Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden

Book excerpt: First published c. 1904 in France, Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden is a hilarious and remarkably inventive collection of erotic prose and verse written by the influential libertine-mystic and magician Aleister Crowley. Sections of prose and verse are unified through a biographical frame narrative attributing them to a single author-poet-perpetrator. The first section, The Nameless Novel, was written primarily to amuse Crowley's convalescing wife, Rose Kelly. A scatological parody of erotic literature, it takes aim at the usual targets of libertine fiction and modern erotica but, at the same time, lampoons their (libertine fiction and erotica's) limitations and conventions through absurdity and hyperbole. The verse sections, which include black parodies of notable Victorian poets such as Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were added to extend the literary forms in Crowley's earlier erotic work, White Stains (1898), which is also available from Birchgrove Press.