![]() Except for “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” he completed hardly anything after his downfall, mainly because, as he confided to friends, he found it impossible to “laugh at life” anymore. Wilde himself died painfully from meningitis at 46. His mother died in 1896, his estranged wife Constance two years later. ![]() (Some even thought it a good idea.) But as Wilde said: “I know it’s the only way out, but I haven’t the courage.”Īfter Wilde was released, he fled to Italy and France and lost everything he loved. Life grew so dire that friends and family were concerned he might kill himself. Several days of testimony recounted stains on hotel bedsheets and details of Wilde’s sexual predilections Wilde was eventually sentenced to two years in prison, where he was reduced to sewing mail bags and consulting with the medical staff on his frequency of masturbation. Sturgis’ account of his final years is more convincingly detailed than in any other biography. Queensberry responded by filing criminal charges for “acts of gross indecency with other male persons.”įor a man who was often generous and kind - and just as often deeply arrogant and selfish - Wilde suffered one of the saddest public downfalls in modern times. He sued Queensberry for libel, gave one of his funniest and most moving public presentations in court, and lost. ” Though Wilde was entreated by friends to take the quiet road away from controversy, as usual he chose the performative one. After his relationship with the wayward Lord Alfred Douglas and several other young men became known, Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensberry, left a card for Wilde at the Albemarle Club accusing him of being a “ponce” and a “Somdomite. ![]() ![]() Reading Woolf’s extended essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ is a transformative moment for one 15-year-old Tucson girl.Įventually, the portents gathered steam and, at the height of Wilde’s fame, knocked him down so hard he never got up again. In many ways, he must have been a welcome antithesis to high-toned, somber intellectuals like Henry James and William Dean Howells he was more a precursor to the 20th century’s stadium-filling stand-up comics, such as George Carlin and Steve Martin.Įntertainment & Arts A deep sense of kinship with Virginia Woolf And he never missed an opportunity to meet anyone whose name could be dropped at the next social event - Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Ulysses S. Surprisingly, his breakthrough “literary” success was as a public speaker in the early 1880s, during a lecture circuit from New York to San Francisco and back, he “conquered” America as utterly as the Beatles would 70 years later. His first great literary invention was himself. “Nothing succeeds like excess,” Wilde famously said, but then Wilde famously said a lot of things it’s hard to think of any artist who has been more frequently and happily quoted. When a story went round that he paraded down Piccadilly with a lily in his hand, Wilde remarked, “Anyone could have done that.” Instead he had achieved “the great and difficult thing” of making the “world believe” he had done it. When popular lampoons of the “aesthetes” began appearing as cartoons in Punch or as musicals on the West End stage, Wilde hurriedly claimed credit for them - whether they were based on him or not. The first two-thirds is as bright and entertaining as an evening with its subject the final third describes one of the saddest stories ever told. While Sturgis doesn’t approach his subject with Ellmann’s critical intensity, he includes much new material, especially recovered testimonies from Wilde’s reputation-ending trials in 1895. Matthew Sturgis’ new book, “Oscar Wilde: A Life,” the first major biography since Richard Ellmann’s in 1987, provides an excellent opportunity to revisit and re-enjoy the fabulous genius of Wilde. Beyond the wall I see nothing.”Įven though many books have been written about Wilde, he continues to attract good scholars. As a prominent London spiritualist told him before his first libel trial: “I see a very brilliant life for you up to a certain point. And after confessing early that his main aims in life were “success fame or even notoriety,” he lived to achieve all three. As a student at Oxford, Wilde was attracted by the idealized homoerotic images of Greek culture, which led him to an increasingly unashamed presentation of himself as a man who adored (and was often adored by) younger men. Long before Wilde’s infamous libel case, his father sued the family’s nanny for claiming he drugged and molested her. Oscar Wilde’s life reads almost like a perfectly formed work of art - one in which each early success bristles with portents of tragedy to come. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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