James Elroy Flecker (5 November 1884 – 3 January 1915) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet, whose poetry was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.
Biography
Herman Elroy Flecker was born on 5 November 1884 in Lewisham, London, to William Herman Flecker, headmaster of Dean Close School in Cheltenham, and his wife Sarah. His much younger brother was the educationalist Henry Lael Oswald Flecker, who became headmaster of Christ's Hospital.
Flecker later chose to use the first name "James", either because he disliked the name "Herman" or to avoid confusion with his father. "Roy", as his family called him, was educated at Dean Close School, and then at Uppingham. He subsequently studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. While at Oxford, he was greatly influenced by the last flowering of the Aesthetic movement there under John Addington Symonds, and became a close friend of the classicist and art historian John Beazley.
From 1908, Flecker worked in the consular service in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a ship to Athens, he met Hellé Skiadaressi, and they were married in 1911.
Flecker died on 3 January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland, and was buried in Bouncer's Lane Cemetery, Cheltenham. His death at the age of thirty was described at the time as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".
Hellé Flecker settled in England. She edited Flecker's Letters: Some Letters from Abroad of James Elroy Flecker, published by Heinemann in 1930 "with a few reminiscences by Hellé Flecker". In 1935, she was awarded a Civil List pension of £90 a year "in recognition of the services rendered by her husband to poetry". Hellé Flecker survived her husband for more than 45 years, dying in Sunbury-on-Thames in October 1961.
