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'''Walter Pater''' Walter Horatio Pater (1839–1894) was an essayist, literary and art critic, and novelist.

He was born in [[Stepney]], the son of a doctor, who died while Walter was an infant. The family then moved to [[Enfield]]. He was educated at the King's School [[Canterbury]] and Queen's College, [[Oxford]]. He abandoned boyhood thoughts of becoming a clergyman, and remained in Oxford as a private tutor and then a fellow of Brasenose College.

Letters have recently emerged documenting a "romance"<ref name=Inman>Billie Andrew Inman | year = 1991 | title = Pater in the 1990s |chapter = Estrangement and Connection: Walter Pater, Benjamin Jowett, and William M. Hardinge | url = http://www.uncg.edu/eng/elt/pater/chap2.html | accessdate =27 November 2007 |archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20070804230203/http://www.uncg.edu/eng/elt/pater/chap2.html |archivedate = 4 August 2007</ref> with a nineteen-year-old Balliol undergraduate, William Money Hardinge, who had attracted unfavorable attention as a result of his outspoken homosexuality and blasphemous verse, and who later became a novelist.[14] Many of Pater's works focus on male beauty, friendship and love, either in a Platonic way or, obliquely, in a more physical way.<ref name="eribon">{{Citation |title = Insult and the Making of the Gay Self |first= Didier |last= Eribon | others = Lucey, Michael (transl.) |year = 2004 |publisher = Duke University Press |isbn= 0-8223-3371-6 | pages = 159–79}} Another undergraduate, W. H. Mallock, had passed the Pater-Hardinge letters to Jowett,<ref>Information given by [[Edmund Gosse]] to [[A. C. Benson]] (Benson's ''Diary'', 73, 1 September 1905); ''Walter Pater: An Imaginative Sense of Fact'', ed. Philip Dodd (London, 1981), p.48</ref> who summoned Pater:

:"Pater's whole nature changed under the strain" (wrote A. C. Benson in his diary) "after the dreadful interview with Jowett. He became old, crushed, despairing – and this dreadful weight lasted for years; it was years before he realised that Jowett would not use them."<ref>A. C. Benson, ''Diary'', 73, 1 September 1905; ''Walter Pater: An Imaginative Sense of Fact'', ed. Philip Dodd (London, 1981), p.48</ref>

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[[Category:Novelists]]
[[Category:Essayists]
[[Category:1839 births]]
[[Category:1894 deaths]]