Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is a 1969 biography of the English poet, playwright, and aesthetician Oscar Wilde by American literary critic Richard Ellmann. Utilizing a treasure trove of Wilde’s surviving letters and other private writings, Ellmann finds new insights into Wilde’s better-known works, situating him among his contemporaries in fin de siècle, or turn-of-the-century art. At a young age, Wilde became one of the most popular playwrights in London, while also producing many plays and epigrams. Ellmann illuminates the incredibly difficult conditions that Wilde lived under as a homosexual man, which informed his art, personality, and political views until his tragic death at the age of forty-six. The biography attempts to paint a comprehensive picture of Wilde that explains why the genius author is now considered essential to the history of British literature.

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854, in Ireland. From an early age, he showed a deep love of learning, seeming able to pick up new subjects and skills with ease. His interest in intellectual activities was coupled with distaste for athletic endeavors; luckily, his school environment made it relatively easy to avoid sports and focus on reading and writing. Wilde went on to enroll at Oxford, where the rigorous and inflexible curriculum strained the limits of his patience. He graduated only after years of struggling against school administrators over obstacles his peers automatically accepted, such as final exams. During his final months at Oxford, Wilde contracted syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection for which there would be no cure until well into the twentieth century.

To support himself financially after college, Wilde joined the working world. Like many young graduates in the late 1800s, he had a difficult time making a living with the few odd jobs he found. Why he decided to become a playwright is uncertain, but seems to have been due to a lack of opportunities more than a sudden inspiration. Wilde knew that only people who were already well-known could succeed commercially as playwrights. His mother, Lady Wilde, moved to London and supported him financially while he built a name for himself. Later, Oscar began to tour America, where he gained his first fan following. Though his first forays into playwriting were full of obstacles, Wilde finally managed to get a few into production.



To make himself even more respectable, Wilde acceded to the strong social pressures to marry and raise a family. He did so reluctantly, having rejected institutions such as marriage during college. After the birth of his second son, Wilde realized he was gay. The revelation had a difficult timing, for Wilde’s career was just beginning to pick up, and the news would have brought it crashing down. Wilde tried to keep his sexuality a secret while refusing to abstain from following his sexual drives. Though he thought he was discreet enough to pull off this double life, people soon noticed and began to gossip. Ironically, Wilde’s wife, Constance, was one of the few people who remained oblivious to his sexuality until his conviction.

Wilde fell in love with Lord Alfred Douglas, the wealthy heir to the estate of the Marquis of Queensberry. Douglas matched Wilde in extravagance, but exceeded him in many vices, including recklessness and arrogance. He used Wilde to fund his gambling addiction and would become enraged when Wilde refused any of his desires. The two frequently cut ties, but reconciled every time. Nevertheless, Douglas’s recklessness coupled with Wilde’s obliviousness ultimately cost Wilde his career. He lost his wife and sons, as well as his fortune, and was disallowed from staging any of his creations in London, all for being gay. He was sentenced to two years in prison for engaging in homosexual acts, a criminal offense at the time. Before he died, however, he worked his way back into the publishing world, with the release of his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In 1900, syphilis finally claimed his life when it caused an even deadlier infection, meningitis.

Wilde died at the age of forty-six, never having restored his reputation or noticeably shifted the public’s perception of homosexuality. Yet, Ellmann contends, his legacy proved to do both. Though Wilde, tragically, never experienced the fruits of his suffering, he is immortalized as one of the greatest English writers of all time.