Edward Ashley Walrond Clarke was born in 1860. From 1876 to 1879, he was a pupil at Radley College, experiences which would later serve as the basis for his only novel, Jaspar Tristram (1899). This book inspired mixed reviews: some critics thought it a masterpiece and compared it favourably with the works of Henry James, while others considered it dull and morbid. Though the novel did not sell well enough to run into a second edition, it gained a cult popularity in gay literary circles, being avidly read by Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, and Marc-André Raffalovich among others, and may well have been an influence on E. M. Forster’s Maurice and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Little is known about Clarke’s life, except that he joined the Foreign Office in 1881 and by 1909 was stationed in Zanzibar, where he died of heart failure in 1913.
