(In this celebrated work, his only novel, Wilde forged a d...)
In this celebrated work, his only novel, Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England. Combining elements of the Gothic horror novel and decadent French fiction, the book centers on a striking premise: As Dorian Gray sinks into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he must keep hidden from the world.
(A House of Pomegranates is a collection of fairy tales, w...)
A House of Pomegranates is a collection of fairy tales, written by Oscar Wilde, that was published in 1891 as a second collection for The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888).
(Intentions, originally published in May 1891, is one of O...)
Intentions, originally published in May 1891, is one of Oscar Wilde's most important critical works. It consists of four essays: "The Decay of Lying," "Pen, Pencil and Poison," "The Critic as Artist," and "The Truth of Masks."
(A Woman of No Importance is a play by Irish playwright Os...)
A Woman of No Importance is a play by Irish playwright Oscar Wilde. The play premièred on 19 April 1893 at London's Haymarket Theatre. Like Wilde's other society plays, it satirizes English upper class society.
(An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedic stage play by Oscar W...)
An Ideal Husband is an 1895 comedic stage play by Oscar Wilde which revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on the themes of public and private honour.
(Here is Oscar Wilde's most brilliant tour de force, a wit...)
Here is Oscar Wilde's most brilliant tour de force, a witty and buoyant comedy of manners that has delighted millions in countless productions since its first performance in London's St. James' Theatre on February 14, 1895. The Importance of Being Earnest is celebrated not only for the lighthearted ingenuity of its plot, but for its inspired dialogue, rich with scintillating epigrams still savored by all who enjoy artful conversation.
(Wilde, glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwrig...)
Wilde, glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown and intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years includes the haunting elegy to his young sister and the grieving lyric at the death of his father. The religious drama of his romance with Rome is captured here, as well as its resolution in his renewed love of ancient Greece. He explores forbidden sexual desires, pays homage to the great theatre stars and poets of his day, observes cityscapes with impressionist intensity. His final masterpiece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, tells the painful story of his own prison experience and calls for universal compassion. This edition of Wilde's verse presents the full range of his achievement as a poet.
The British author Oscar Wilde was part of the "art for art's sake" movement in English literature at the end of the 19th century. He is best known for his brilliant, witty comedies.
Background
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a well-known surgeon; his mother, Jane Francisca Elgee Wilde, wrote popular poetry and prose under the pseudonym Speranza.
Education
Oscar Wilde attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh and was a very talented student. He was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin. From Trinity College, he won a scholarship to Magdalen College Oxford University. He was a brilliant scholar but also increasingly rebellious. In one academic year he got rusticated for turning up to College 3 weeks after the start of term. Thus after a while, he lost interest in pursuing an academic career in Oxford and moved to London.
In 1878 Oscar Wilde was awarded the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Ravenna." He attracted a group of followers, and they initiated a personal cult, self-consciously effete and artificial. "The first duty in life," Wilde wrote in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), "is to be as artificial as possible." After leaving Oxford he expanded his cult. His iconoclasm contradicted the Victorian era's easy pieties, but the contradiction was one of his purposes. Another of his aims was the glorification of youth.
Wilde published his well-received Poems in 1881. The next six years were active ones. He spent an entire year lecturing in the United States and then returned to lecture in England. He applied unsuccessfully for a position as a school inspector. He began to publish extensively in the following year. His writing activity became as intense and as erratic as his life had been for the previous six years. From 1887 to 1889 Wilde edited the magazine Woman's World. His first popular success as a prose writer was The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). The House of Pomegranates (1892) was another collection of his fairy tales.
Wilde became a practicing homosexual in 1886. He believed that his subversion of the Victorian moral code was the impulse for his writing. He considered himself a criminal who challenged society by creating scandal. Before his conviction for homosexuality in 1895, the scandal was essentially private. Wilde believed in the criminal mentality. "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891), treated murder and its successful concealment comically. The original version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott's Magazine emphasized the murder of the painter Basil Hallward by Dorlan as the turning point in Dorian's disintegration; the criminal tendency became the criminal act.
Dorian Gray was published in book form in 1891. The novel celebrated youth: Dorian, in a gesture typical of Wilde, is parentless. He does not age, and he is a criminal. Like all of Wilde's work, the novel was a popular success. His only book of formal criticism, Intentions (1891), restated many of the esthetic views that Dorian Gray had emphasized, and it points toward his later plays and stories. Intentions emphasized the importance of criticism in an age that Wilde believed was uncritical. For him, criticism was an independent branch of literature, and its function was vital.
Between 1892 and 1895 Wilde was an active dramatist, writing what he identified as "trivial comedies for serious people." His plays were popular because their dialogue was baffling, clever, and often epigrammatic, relying on puns and elaborate word games for its effect. Lady Windermere's Fan was produced in 1892, A Woman of No Importance in 1893, and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.
On March 2, 1895, Wilde initiated a suit for criminal libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had objected to Wilde's friendship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. When his suit failed in April, countercharges followed. After a spectacular court action, Wilde was convicted of homosexual misconduct and sentenced to 2 years in prison at hard labor.
Prison transformed Wilde's experience as radically as had his 1886 introduction to homosexuality. In a sense he had prepared himself for prison and its transformation of his art. De Profundisis a moving letter to a friend and apologia that Wilde wrote in prison; it was first published as a whole in 1905. His theme was that he was not unlike other men and was a scapegoat. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) was written after his release. In this poem a man has murdered his mistress and is about to be executed, but Wilde considered him only as criminal as the rest of humanity. He wrote: "For each man kills the thing he loves, / Yet each man does not die."
After his release from prison Wilde lived in France. He attempted to write a play in his pretrial style, but this effort failed. He died in Paris on November 30, 1900.
Wilde was officially an Anglican for the vast majority of his life. He had a lifelong interest and respect for the Catholic religion, and converted to Catholicism on his deathbed.
Politics
Being highly educated from both Trinity College and Oxford, Wilde was deeply interested in politics and was an advocate for socialism. His essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism argues that capitalism crushes creativity, as people are so focused on solving the social problems caused by capitalism.
Views
The Aesthetic Movement of the 19th century argued that art should exist for art’s sake only, without any sort of political agenda. Wilde’s essays, plays, and novels led the aesthetic movement for other artists and he was a prominent example of this movement for other authors writing in the 19th century.
Quotations:
"Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
"Two men look out a window. One sees mud, the other sees the stars."
"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
"Be yourself; everyone else is taken."
"Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness."
"No man is rich enough to buy back his past. "
"Women are made to be loved, not understood."
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
Personality
Wilde was known to be extraordinarily clever and articulate during his time and despite being ill with cerebral meningitis, his infamous last words were just as witty as his many remarks he made when he was well. His last words are reported to be: 'my wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.'
After studying Greek for nearly nine years, Oscar Wilde was an exceptional linguist and spoke many languages. He was fluent in English, German, French and had a working knowledge of Italian and Greek. Conversely, he could not speak a single word of Irish.
Although born Irish and in Dublin, Oscar Wilde skillfully entered high society with his popular wit and playwriting skills. He was considered an early Victorian celebrity, and became well known throughout Europe and the British Isles. He was deemed a larger than life character, and his outrageous outfits were often the subjects of cartoon satire.
Wilde's sexual orientation has variously been considered bisexual and homosexual. He may have had significant sexual relationships with (in chronological order) Frank Miles, Constance Lloyd (his wife), Robert Baldwin Ross, and Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"). Wilde also had numerous sexual encounters with working-class male youths, who were often rent boys.
Quotes from others about the person
"From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands." - W. H. Auden
"Despite the number of his books and plays, Mr. Wilde was not, I think, what one calls a born writer. His writing seemed always to be rather an overflow of intellectual temperamental energy than an inevitable, absorbing function. That he never concentrated himself on any one form of literature is a proof that the art of writing never really took hold of him." - Max Beerbohm
"When in doubt, I read Oscar Wilde." - Camille Paglia
"A man whose wisdom touches on nearly every conceivable topic, often without consent, which in turn has led to several lawsuits, renown'd for his beautiful diction and his skilled oratory, Oscar is without doubt one of the leading literary figures of the last few millennia."
Connections
On 29 May 1884, Oscar Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of Horace Lloyd, a wealthy Queen's Counsel. The couple had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.
In 1886, while Constance was pregnant with their second child, Wilde was seduced by seventeen-year-old Robert Baldwin Ross, the grandson of the Canadian reform leader Robert Baldwin. Subsequently, they developed a relationship and Ross became Wilde’s first male lover.
In 1891, Wilde met Alfred Douglas, son of John Douglas, 9th Marques of Queensberry, and developed an affair with him. Unable to stop the liaison, the Marques left his calling card at Wilde's club, inscribed: "For Oscar Wilde, posing sodomite" on 18 February 1895.
Against his friends' advice, Wilde filed a suit of libel against the Marques. To protect himself, the Marques appointed detectives to find evidence about Wilde’s homosexuality and planned to portray him as the older man who habitually seduced the young and innocent. Many were also coerced to give evidence against Wilde.
The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, a book by Merlin Holland documents an alarmingly swift fall from grace; it is also a supremely moving testament to the right to live, work, and love as one's heart dictates.
Oscar Wilde
Winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Oscar Wilde is the definitive biography of the tortured poet and playwright and the last book by renowned biographer and literary critic Richard Ellmann.
1969
Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years
Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years, a book by Nicholas Frankel, challenges the prevailing, traditional view of Wilde as a broken, tragic figure, a martyr to Victorian sexual morality, and shows instead that he pursued his post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.