Vainglory ─ With Inclinations and Caprice

The cult favorite absurdist comedy by a writer who inspired Wilde, Forster, and Waugh

The fairly young and entirely alive Mrs. Shamefoot wants nothing more than to have a memorial stained-glass window installed in her honor in an English cathedral. From this premise, the inimitable Ronald Firbank extends his witty, eccentric Vainglory, with a crowded cast of hilariously drawn characters—Winsome Brooks, Lady Anne Pantry, Miss Wookie, Mrs. Barrow of Dawn, and Mrs. Steeple, among others—a riot of parties, and a bottomless sense of the ridiculous. Firbank's fine comic skill, quick-fire dialogue, and descriptive flights of fancy are perfectly captured in Vainglory, his first and longest novel, as well as in two novellas included here, Inclinations and Caprice.

Ronald Firbank (1886–1926) wrote Valmouth, The Princess Zabaroff, The Flower Beneath the Foot, Sorrow in Sunlight, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, among other works.

Richard Canning has edited several anthologies of gay fiction and was the recipient of the 2005 Editors Choice Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation.