100 Heroes: Eric Stenbock
The gay man who became an renowned writer.
Eric Stanislaus was a Baltic Swedish poet and writer of macabre fantastic fiction.
Life
Born in 1860, Stenbock was the count of Bogesund and the heir to an estate near Kolga in Estonia.
He was the son of Lucy Sophia Frerichs, the daughter and heiress of Johann Andreas Frerichs, a Manchester cotton tycoon, and Count Erich Stenbock, of a distinguished Swedish noble family of the Baltic German House of nobility in Reval.
Stenbock inherited an enormous fortune.
Stenbock attended Balliol College in Oxford but never completed his studies. While at Oxford, Eric was deeply influenced by the homosexual Pre-Raphaelite artist and illustrator Simeon Solomon. He is also said to have had a relationship with the composer and conductor Norman O'Neill and with numerous other young men.
Work
Stenbock lived in England most of his life, and wrote his works in the English language. He published a number of books of verse during his lifetime, including Love, Sleep, and Dreams (1881) and Rue, Myrtle, and Cypress (1883). In 1894, Stenbock published The Shadow of Death, his last volume of verse, and Studies of Death, a collection of short stories.
Death
Stenbock died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1895.
