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‘Mr Clarke is familiar with school-life, and writes about it amazingly well. The book deserves the attention of all those who care for the finer qualities of fiction. It is a remarkable book.’ - The Times ‘Far above the average novel.’ - Saturday Review
‘A real masterpiece.’ - The Academy
‘There is real power in it, and power of a somewhat rare kind. The author makes his story live as a real one to the mind of the reader.’ - The Speaker
Based on the author’s boarding school experiences at Radley College in the late 1870s, Jaspar Tristram (1899) is an extraordinary psychological study of the eponymous hero, tracing his thoughts and emotions as he proceeds from boyhood towards young adulthood: his unhappiness at school, his affection for the older boy Orr and later his love for his friend L. C. ‘Elsie’ Southwood. As A. D. Harvey writes in the Introduction, it is ‘one of the most painfully convincing portrayals of adolescence ever written’. Though presented in the safer guise of a story of ‘schoolboy friendships’, it is also one of the earliest gay-themed English novels ever published.
Praised by late-Victorian critics, Jaspar Tristram quickly became a cult favourite in gay literary circles, counting Oscar Wilde (who called it ‘charming’), Edward Carpenter, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich among its admirers, and it is also a likely influence on E. M. Forster’s Maurice and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. This first-ever republication of the only novel by A. W. Clarke (1860-1913) reprints the unabridged text of the scarce first edition and includes a new introduction.
