Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900–1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. It comprises eight volumes with an additional volume of critical essays first published in The Guardian. This is the first of two volumes of Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater's only full-length fiction. A novel of ideas, combining history and philosophy with a fictional narrative set in the late Roman Empire, the work is a fascinating experiment in the boundaries of genre.
