Amazon.com
Richard Ellmann capped an illustrious career in biography (his James Joyce is considered one of the masterpieces of the 20th century) with this life of Oscar Wilde, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize on its original publication in 1988. Ellmann's account of Wilde's extravagantly operatic life as poet, playwright, aesthete, and martyr to sexual morality is notable not only for the full portrait it gives of Wilde, but also for Ellmann's assessment of his subject's literary greatness; both aims are served by a plethora of quotations from Wilde's own work and correspondence. Wilde straddled the line between the Victorian age and the modern world as he did everything in life ... with impeccable style.
Book Description
The biography sensitive to the tragic pattern of the story of a great subject: Oscar Wilde - psychologically and sexually complicated, enormously quotable, central to a alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.
Customer Reviews:
TO KNOW WILDE, KNOW HIS MOTHER.......2006-08-12
Just as to know James Joyce, discover his daughter, the spark of his own genius.
Lady Wilde was a writer and Irish revolutionary who raised her son to infiltrate the highest ranks of the empire and expose their foibles, faults, cruelties and hidden shames, which he so fully did through his theatre work and other writings. He was investigating the widespread homosexuality of the British aristocracy when he was arested for his prying and blamed for that which he himself investigated and reported. He was silenced through breaking imprisonment (read his post-prison poetry, and the uneven yet revelatory De Profundis written from prison) which debilitated, discouraged and killed him a few short years after his release.
TO know Wilde, know his mother: Speranza, Lady Wilde, whose wonderful works of Irish history and legends are now available on amazon.com only in Spanish translation. Several good biographies are also available at unattainable price.
Know alos his son. Wilde was a loving family man who wrote wonderful bedtime stories for his own beloved children. What broke him in prison was losing them, as he writes in De Profundis.
Ellman's is a fine biography. Find out far more about Wilde than the popular and shallow slander urgently promoted by the Empire
scholarly yet stimulating.......2004-07-09
I remember reading this book when I was 16 and being blown away by the erudition. Even to this day it's probably the most erudite biography I've ever read. The scholarly weight and depth of this book is tremendous. It is amazingly comprehensive. This is the kind of book that takes 20 years to write and must be a labor of love for the writer--the writer must really love his subject, in this case, Wilde. And one has every indication from the book that Richard Ellman did. His portrait of Wilde is no less sympathetic as it is complete. This must be the definitive biography which all other Wilde bios should be measured against. A superlative achievement.
David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"
Utterly Moving.......2004-02-05
I had just finished this book ten minutes ago and I am completely in love with the man. His life was one of both tragedy and creativity. I felt so sad for him in the last part of his life. He was an amazing soul and this bio accented it. A must read!
Likely to stand as the definitive biography of Wilde.......2002-10-14
If Richard Ellmann had not already written the definitive literary biography (his astonishing JAMES JOYCE), this utterly first-rate biography would be a legitimate candidate for the title. One might initially think that Wilde would be an easy subject for a biography: his life was interesting, eventful, literarily significant, triumphant, and tragic. But the problem is that for many Wilde has become a symbol either of the late 19th century Victorian decadence or the oppressed homosexual. To treat anyone, and especially Wilde, primarily as a symbol or a representative of anything outside himself, is to distort and misrepresent. The genius of Ellmann's biography of Wilde is that Wilde never becomes either more or less than the writer and person Oscar Wilde.
The portrait that emerges of Wilde is absolutely fascinating. If Ellmann's JAMES JOYCE is the greater biography, Wilde emerges nonetheless as the more interesting of the two Irish authors, and perhaps the more brilliant, if not the more productive. Indeed, one of the things that emerges from Ellmann's book is a sense that Wilde might have become a greater writer than he did, and not just if he had not sued the Marquess of Queensbury and had not been sent to prison on sodomy charges. Wilde emerges as even more brilliant than the work he produced, as if he had produced much of his work with a minimum of reference.
Ellmann does a marvelous job of situation Wilde in his time and place, with the cultural and artistic concerns paramount at the time. He also does a fair and just job of depicting the major involvements in his life, beginning with Whistler and his wife Constance and continuing on with his various involvements, especially with Alfred Lord Douglas. With the latter, Ellmann certainly does not try to idealize the relationship, but recounts it warts and all. If there is a villain in the book, it is not, surprisingly, the Marquess of Queensbury, but his son Lord Douglas.
The saddest part of the book, by far, is the section recounting Wilde's life after leaving prison, which is one disappointment after another. He first intended to reunite and reconcile with his wife, but she unexpectedly died, thereby cutting himself off from both a family and his children. He then reunites uncomfortably with Lord Douglas, but the attempt is a disaster. He final year or two are recounted as being especially miserable, with an impoverished Wilde reduced to conversing entertainingly with strangers for the benefit of a drink. It is especially heartbreaking to read how almost all his former friends cut him off, refusing to help him in his time of greatest need. An encounter with a young man from Arkansas provides perhaps the most apt Wilde quote from his last days. Upon hearing about Arkansas, Wilde remarked, "I would like to flee like a wounded hart into Arkansas."
One learns a vast amount of fascinating biographical detail about Wilde's life from this book. For instance: Wilde was double-jointed, could speed read and knock off books in scarcely more than a half hour in some instances. He was acquainted with the Yeats family in Ireland, and spoke with a pronounced Irish accent until he went to Oxford. He bought Thomas Carlyle's writing desk. He was a Mason. Physically he had tiny feet and teeth that were darkened by mercury treatments. And there is much, much more.
On nearly every level, this is a truly great biography. Even if one is not a fan of Wilde's works, it is definitely worth reading.
A Must-Read For Wilde Fans.......2002-07-01
Oscar Wilde was a man of paradoxes, both a man completely of his time and ahead of his time. He is also one of the most interesting, and tragic, literary figures of all-time. In our age of "information quick" (though it was the same in his own age), Wilde is often misunderstood (both his life and his works.) It's easy to get a one-sided version of Wilde the writer, or Wilde the man. That is why this extremely well-written, Pulitzer Prize-winning, masterpiece of a biography is absolutely essential for the Wilde scholar or the Wilde fan. Ellman skillfully avoids what he could've so easily done, and what so many other have done: write a sensational, tabloidistic account of Wilde's remarkable and scandalous life. Instead, he carefully, skillyfully - and, not least important, lovingly - assembles a neat balance between the sensational elements of Wilde's remarkable life and his literary legacy. Wilde, whose works are often dismissed (despite being probably the most widely quoted source in the world outside of The Bible and Shakespeare, and despite having his works widely and frequently plagarized) because of his lifestyle, and Ellman thankfully gives him his due here. Thanks to people like Ellman, Wilde's literary works rest now, finally, where they are due: at the top of the pantheon. He also goes a long way towards explaining the underlying motives behind Wilde's seemingly self-conscious descent into oblivion. Wilde, to the casual observer, seems almost to have been on a deliberate mission of artistic and personal suicide, and Ellman goes a long way here towards explaining his motives. As Wilde himself said, his life itself was his greatest work of art - it's very moving and incredibly tragic to watch his spectacular meteoric rise and even more spectacular fall, leading into his amazing decline, disgrace, and exile. One of the most famous men of his time in the 1890's, it's incredible to see how totally Wilde was shunned after his imprisonment. However, with the passage of more than a century - in which tolerance has made great bounds, both for gays and for the expulsion of literary censorship - Wilde's star can hardly be said to have ever shined brighter. Every year brings a new movie adaptation of one his plays (a movie of this book was even made a few years ago), his plays are still being staged, and his books are still widely read and discussed - not to mention that he is one of the most widely quoted invididuals in the English language. One may still well question Wilde's wanton ways and his decision to face the music, even when it was obvious and inevitable that he was going to lose both his reputation and possibly his life - but remember only what one W.B. Yeats has said of Wilde: "I never for a moment thought that he made the wrong decision" - Wilde, who lavished and delighted in pointing out the hypocrisy of his age and society won the right, by submitting to it, to critize it more. Now, a hundred years on, Wilde - poet, playwright, wit, and martyr to sexual mores - stands as tall as ever, a huge, larger-than-life, towering figure, his wit remaining, as Ellman says, "an agent of renewal."
Amazon.com
Since the 1960s, when his work gained a new recognition in the literary canon, biographies of Oscar Wilde and critical analysis of his work have become commonplace. While this writing acknowledged the "fact" of Wilde's homosexuality, it did not, for the most part, explore the complexity of the impact it had upon his life and work. This is remedied in Neil Bartlett's Who Was That Man?, which squarely places Wilde in a gay historical context and literary tradition.
Neil Bartlett--an openly gay British novelist, critic and leading innovator on the British stage--has produced the one of the most remarkable books ever written on Wilde. Who Was That Man? is a personal meditation on Wilde's work and the relevance of the artist and playwright in the contemporary world. Bartlett uses his own experience as a gay man to understand Wilde's life and manages--through extensive historical research and evocative language--to make observations and connections and illuminate our understanding of the writer and his place in his own world and ours.
Customer Reviews:
The Wilde Side.......2000-02-04
A gay Londoner of the 80s goes searching for his roots and finds Oscar Wilde, a complex figure early on in the history of the cultural and social construction of twentieth-century homosexuality. If you're interested in Wilde, this is a very good book to read along with Richard Ellman's more standard biography.
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Wilde's Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross, 1869-1918
Maureen Borland
Manufacturer: Queen Anne Press
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- Thin book, fat wits!
- Unparalleled Wit & Wisdom
- Thin small and funny
- Oscar Wilde is a Genius
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Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)
Oscar Wilde
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
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Similar Items:
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The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
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The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)
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Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics)
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The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
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The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde
ASIN: 0486401464 |
Book Description
Epigrams, aphorisms, and other bon mots gathered from the celebrated wit's plays, essays, and conversation offer an entertaining selection of observations both comic and profound. Organized by category, the nearly 400 quotes range in subject from human nature, morals, and society to art, politics, history, and more.
Customer Reviews:
Thin book, fat wits!.......2007-10-18
This sweet little book is full of Oscar Wilde's great little quips. I absolutely love it! I keep it next to my desk and pick it up for those sweet little chuckle breaks that we all must take to break up the dreary work day! Great little read! Promise!
Unparalleled Wit & Wisdom.......2002-12-01
"I can resist everything except temptation."
"There is no sin except stupidity."
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."
"It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done."
These laconic aphorisms are just the tip of the iceberg of Wilde's impressive, yet oftentimes eclectic and nihilistic, use of the English language. Dover gives us 60 pages of brilliant witticisms and axioms to use over and over again for a mere dollar. You can't go wrong. Also recommended - Dover's Shakespeare quotes book for a dollar. Enjoy.
Thin small and funny.......2002-01-11
Everyone knows OW was a witty guy.
If you want to find witty things he said in one small book such that you can try to emulate his wit, this book is for you.
It's good for an hour's read where you will snicker, snort, and grin.
It's exactly what i expected and exactly what I got. Whee!
Oscar Wilde is a Genius.......2000-03-27
This collection of Wilde's greatest quotes is an easy read, and wonderful to keep around the house. Wilde's wisdom is displayed throughout this edition, and is a must have for any Wilde fan.
Amazon.com
She was lovely, sophisticated, and famous for her witty conversation, even in a social circle that was known for its fabulous talkers. The only child of Oscar Wilde's dissipated older brother Willie, Dolly Wilde (1895-1941) led a life as scandalous and glittering as her uncle's: she, too, loved her own sex, and her longest romantic relationship was with American heiress Natalie Clifford Barney, who was host of the most important Parisian literary salon of the 20th century. Unfortunately for Dolly's posthumous reputation, she "was an artist of the spoken word" whose only written legacy was her marvelous correspondence. Quoting liberally and perceptively from those letters, American playwright Joan Schenkar brings Wilde to life in a modernist biography that is written in prose as sparkling as Dolly's fabled bons mots. Schenkar eschews conventional chronology to consider Wilde's life thematically, from her lesbianism to her taste for smart society to her self-destructive identification with Uncle Oscar. She reminds us just how remarkable and accomplished were the women at Barney's salon (journalist Janet Flanner, novelist Djuna Barnes, and artist Mina Loy, among them) and how much they esteemed Dolly Wilde. Yet, her biographer downplays neither Wilde's addiction to drugs nor the sad loneliness of her death (possibly from a drug overdose) at age 45. This is essentially a tale of "squandered gifts and lost opportunities," Schenkar acknowledges, but she successfully provokes readers to share her admiration for Wilde's prodigal generosity with both her talent and her affections. --Wendy Smith
Book Description
For sixty years she was a delicious rumor: Oscar Wilde's enchanting niece Dorothy. Born a scant three months after her uncle's notorious arrest and raised in the shadow of the greatest scandal of the turn of the 20th Century, Dorothy Ierne Wilde died exactly as she lived: vividly, rather violently, and at a very good address.
A "born writer" who never completed the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination, Dolly Wilde was charged with charm, brilliantly witty, changeable as refracting light, and loaded with sexual allure. She made her career in the salonsand in the bedroomsof some of London's and Paris' most interesting women and men. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, she drenched her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs, and created continuous sensations by the ways in which she seemed to be re-living the life of her infamous uncle.
In this revolutionary and very modern biography, Joan Schenkar provides a fascinating look at what it means to live with the talents but not the achievements of biography's usual subjects: those obliterating "winners"like Dolly's uncle Oscarwhose stories have almost erased riveting histories like Dolly's own. And she uncovers never-before-published evidence of the hidden life of the Wilde family and of the extraordinary salon society of Natalie Clifford Barney, Dolly Wilde's longest and most fatal attachment.
"At last, an in-depth portrait of the 'Beautiful Loser of the Wilde family,' a brilliant eccentric whom Janet Flanner rightly described as 'like a character out of a book.' Anyone interested in modernism, gender-bending and/or expatriate Paris will be enthralled by Joan Schenkar's penetrating and often poignant biography of a woman strangely charismatic and witty enough to be 'truly Wilde.'" Sandra M. Gilbert, co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic and No Man's Land
"Truly Wilde is a revelation, the great story of a life and of the creation of modern culture. Read this biography for its high drama, its hijinks, and, at the end, for its poignancy and horror." Catharine R. Stimpson, author and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University
"Joan Schenkar has lifted a veil to reveal a sophisticated, overheated lesbian world in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the center is Oscar Wilde's niece Dollyself-destructive, self-dramatizing, magnetic. This is a great story, beautifully told." Edmund White
"A touching portrait of a louche, lush and lascivious lady who makes today's alleged It Girls look like the vapid paper-dolls they areand a vivid picture of a time when, incredibly, the wealthy and titled were also witty and talented." Julie Burchill, columnist for The Guardian
Customer Reviews:
meaning without words...a wisp of a shadow.......2004-07-02
How do you relate the life of someone who never stepped forward from the shadows of her disgraced uncle, Oscar Wilde? Someone who sparkled like a thousand shards of a broken mirror on a sunlit day?
Dolly was a wisp of a shadow, mesmerizing, bewitching permanently etching herself into onto one's memory with her mere presence. Those who knew her well, Janet Flanner, Natalie Barney, Honey Harris - true wordsmiths all- struggled to explain her enigmatic aura. Captivating, enchanting - adjectives repeated over and over in a vain attempt to eplain her effect on all she met.
Her magic was her brilliant conversation, her charming turn of phrase, the impermanence of flowing dialogue that she wouldn't or couldn't commit to paper. She lived and died in 'The Moment' nothing else mattered. Her flame burned bright and then was gone - a willing(?) or fated victim to excesses she could not (and would not) control and the ravages of a body aged long before its time. Suicide? accident? Murder? The myth and truth of 'Wilde' consumed her all the same.
This biography isn't linear because Dolly didn't live her life linearly. Her life was moments of sight and sound and fury that the author captures completely.
How do you truly explain the unexplainable? This book is at it's best a series of half glimpses, whispered hints, or even dim reflections in mirrors (Dolly hated mirrors)of someone so busy 'living in the moment' that after that glorious moment she was gone with only the faint trace of pleasure and grace.
And somehow all that works and works well, this book recreates her life so much more then a dry recording of droning facts could ever capture of such a glorious spirit. No such dullness For Dolly Wilde! I highly recommend this book.
Truly Milde.......2004-05-28
In the spirit of Schenkar's grasping at straws to add pages to her book, I'd like to provide a recipe of my own:
How to Bore and Infuriate a Reader
Take 1 very interesting character
Add vast amounts of filler and repetition
Lard with half-baked postmodern theory
Heap in generous amounts of self-satisfaction
Infer that you've egregiously taken advantage of Nathalie Barney's elderly and generous housekeeper
Stir it all up with bad prose.
Half-bake and serve forth to an unsuspecting audience.
A wildly brilliant biography.......2003-01-29
With "Truly Wilde," author Joan Schenkar has reinterpreted and redefined the possibilities of the biographical form. Her strategy in recreating the world of Parisian intellectual and artistic salons in which Oscar Wilde's niece Dolly flourished in the 1920s - most notably Natalie Barney's Academie des Femmes - is stunningly iconoclastic, deeply compelling, and brilliantly written. From a base of scrupulous and capacious research, from interviews with primary sources and access to original documents, illustrated with a fascinating array of photographs, Schenkar uses a thematic rather than chronological approach to bring Dolly Wilde and her world to life, and to follow with fierce attention the course of her descent to a lonely death in London at the age of 45. Ms. Schenkar does not feel bound by academic niceties. Her book is rich in the odd detail - a palm reading, for instance, or a favorite recipe - that make that era and those brilliant characters as luminous as real life. In her hands, Dolly Wilde becomes a memorable and ultimately mysterious force of nature.
For The Intelligent Reader.......2003-01-20
There is nothing like pleasure to motivate a book review and I took an enormous pleasure in reading -- and then in instantly re-reading - TRULY WILDE. This book gives such a precise and poetic view of the seductive and fascinating Dolly Wilde and such a generously ducumented look at the period in which she flourished -- a period in which conversation was still an art and identity was something that could still be invented - that you really feel yourself feeling with and for Dolly. It's an exemplary, inventive biography. And the photographs are wonderful.
Truly Wilde assumes that its readers delight in language and ideas and bring to it a certain intelligence. I presume that this refreshing approach accounts for the stellar reviews on the book jacket by such brilliant writers as Jeannette Winterson and Edmund White; I presume that it also accounts for the few, suspiciously vitriolic comments found on this site - which seem to be motivated by something other than a desire to share an opinion.
I HIGHLY recommend TRULY WILDE to all lovers of pleasure who like to think: this book, this life will reward you a thousand times over.
A disaster.......2003-01-13
This is without a doubt the worst book I have ever read. The author's cohorts seem to have agreed upon "experimental" as the operative descriptor for this abomination. In these tedious pages, however, "experimental" means only this: bad research, no facts, meandering/aimless prose, lack of direction, and disorganization. Oh, yes, how could I forget? It also means enormous amounts of filler at the end, including recipes and a handprint analysis-all, no doubt, in an attempt to meet contractual obligations to the publisher for a page count.
Don't take my word for it. Read the New York Times book review that appeared when this book was first published. It was written by a well-known lesbian feminist, and one would expect the reviewer to be sympathetic. Instead, she ripped this book to shreds. Deservedly so, in my opinion.
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- "Between Me and Life There is A Mist of Words Always"
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The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
Ralph Keyes
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Similar Items:
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Oscar Wilde's Wit and Wisdom: A Book of Quotations (Dover Thrift Editions)
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Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins Classics)
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The Secret Life Of Oscar Wilde
ASIN: 0517194600
Release Date: 1999-11-23 |
Book Description
Wilde on Sincerity: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." Nearly a century after his death, the wit of Oscar Wilde remains as fresh and barbed as ever. This collection of his works, letters, reviews, anecdotes and repartee is ample proof of this iconoclast's enduring place in the world of arts and letters.
Customer Reviews:
"Between Me and Life There is A Mist of Words Always".......2003-08-09
Oscar Wilde once said "Drama is the meeting place of art and life." In this essential, compact volume Ralph Keyes leaves a trail to that corner by gathering the flamboyant author's thorniest, at times most insightful quotes and anecdotes. Keyes uses Wilde's plays, reviews, letters, interrogations, even conversational repartee (given its own section) which remained Wilde's signature to his time.
Keyes divides Wilde's epigrams and puns into brief, easily readable sections. Wilde twists traditional views on permanent truths and those of his day: altruism ("Charity creates a multitude of sins.") history ("History is merely gossip.") theology, poverty, dissent ("Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.")
Above all, Wilde (through Keyes' selections) quips and dissects each of the fine arts (music, prose, painting) and roles for creator, viewer, interpreter. He addresses the writer ("Even prophets correct their proofs.") critic ("Criticism is the highest form of autobiography"), and artist ("Like the Greek gods, artists are known only to each other.")
Amid his fast-paced one liners on male-female relations you sense how Wilde viewed marriage over and above his well-known bromide, "Divorces are made in heaven." The book ends with Wilde explaining and defending the homosexual relationship he called "the love that dare not speak its name". Whether or not you accept Wilde's lifestyle preferences, his eloquent, sad defense of a letter he wrote a younger man is moving as he describes the unique merge of intellect and youthful energy which to him formed "the noblest sort of affection." It is as close to heartfelt as anyone could get who once said, "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
Oscar Wilde was parodied, villified, and eventually imprisoned for his beliefs and flamboyance. But he eventually influenced artists from George Bernard Shaw to John Lennon, staking a claim as the earliest example of a postmodern artist. This book helps introduce Wilde's full books and plays (Keyes references them consistently and provides a full bibliography), or helps you reference witty, intellectual (or psuedo-intellectual, as Wilde might have preferred) quotes for any occassion. (As to plagarizing, Wilde himself called it, "the privilege of the appreciative man.") His full literary courses are nutritious and filling enough, but "The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde" is as savory when reading or writing as salt is when dining.
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- A compelling tribute to his life and works
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Oscar Wilde: A Life in Quotes
Manufacturer: Metro Publishing, Limited
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ASIN: 1842410032 |
Book Description
The collected wit and wisdom of Oscar Wilde, linked to form a portrait of his life.
Customer Reviews:
A compelling tribute to his life and works.......2001-05-23
Oscar Wilde is considered a notable writer, but died in poverty in exile in Paris a hundred years ago. Oscar Wilde: A Life In Quotes is a compelling tribute to his life and works as it uses his own writings to examine his sentiments and struggles, adding the author's illustrations and notes to complete a lively, well-rounded presentation.
Amazon.com
Oscar Wilde was a man ahead of his time. He was famous for pushing the parameters of socially accepted sexual codes (albeit with disastrous results), and, as a playwright, for introducing a new, extraordinarily modern, idea of comedy that combined psychological insight with social satire. But he was also one of the primary inventors of the art and science of self-invention and self-promotion. The Wilde Album by Merlin Holland (Wilde's grandson) is a fascinating and comprehensive examination of how Wilde the artist consciously conjured--through a complicated and savvy use of the media--Wilde the personality. Holland has assembled an enormous number of artifacts--from press clippings to political cartoons to theater programs --that map Wilde's emergence as a media celebrity and chart how this image was used against him as his popularity foundered in the face of scandal.
What makes The Wilde Album ultimately moving, and unique, is Holland's use of rare family photos and personal material. Juxtaposed with the vivaciousness of the public life, and in the context of the government's persecution of the artist, this more private material embodies and expresses the pain and needless tragedy of Wilde's life.
Book Description
The most comprehensive collection of photographs and images of Wilde--compiled by his only grandson.
Oscar Wilde was one of the first and unquestionably one of the greatest self-publicists who ever lived. With that exceptional streak of modernity that characterized much of his life and work, he understood the power of the image in his campaign to promote the self. As early as his Oxford days, he had himself photographed with his contemporaries in loud checked suits of the latest fashion. The Wilde Album now publishes more of these images of Oscar than have ever been seen together before, as well as later photographs, some previously unpublished, from the family archive, including rare snapshots of Oscar in his last years in Italy; the famous sitting in New York for Napoleon Sarony in fur coat and velvet suit; and the good, the bad, and the vicious caricatures, cartoons, and lithographs.
In the accompanying text, Merlin Holland examines Wilde's life as reflected in the photographs and images, paying particular attention to his relationships with friends, family, and lovers, as well as the profound influence of his Irish upbringing. He also investigates the reasons for the adverse opinions his work engered and the background to the famous legal battles that finally led to imprisonment and exile.
Customer Reviews:
"...walks between passion and poetry...".......2003-04-14
This volume is more touching and insightful than most
works about Oscar Wilde tend to be. It is filled with
the narrative commentary of Wilde's grandson,
Merlin Holland, who gives honest opinions as well
as factual detail about the various stages of
Oscar Wilde's life.
The treasures, however, are the multitudes of
photographs, memorabilia, and paintings that are
included -- as well as drawings, satirical cartoons
(mostly lampooning Oscar, both at Oxford and later
in life), and wonderful notations under the items.
The most interesting photographs, for me, are
the ones which were done by Napoleon Sarony. They
seem to touch a more thoughtful, poetic, dreamy
Oscar, rather than the posing bon vivant or the
deliberately provocative aesthete/decadent.
The volume does well to have one of those photos
on the cover, as well as having a different photo
beside the title page. The grotesque photos,
that almost make one cringe, though, are of
Oscar in a skirted Greek national costume
(with boots!) from April 1877; Oscar in a
checkered suit and bowler hat at Oxford in
1878, and Oscar at age 2 in a blue velvet
dress, a daguerreotype which has been color
tinted. The weirdest photos are of the
"blond tiger/panther" Lord Alfred Douglas,
would-be "friend" and lover of Oscar. His
eyes look vacant, haunted, cold in most of
the photos , except for the one on page 147,
in which he looks touchingly sensitive and
lonely...the caption below the picture says
it all: "Douglas aged 23. 'Your slim gilt
soul walks between passion and poetry. I know
Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you
in Greek days,' Wilde wrote to him around that
time."
Truly a remarkable album of memories.
A Little Gem for Folks Wild for Wilde.......2002-07-16
This is a sparkling gem for all fans of Oscar Wilde. It is a brilliant retelling of Oscar's life through pictures. Filled with everything from photographs of Wilde the aesthete to hilarious caricatures of him from Punch magazine to some of Wilde's own drawings and notes, this fabulous little book has it all. Many of the items I have not seen in any other volume. It goes wonderfully well coupled with Richard Ellman's gorgeous biography or it stands tall on its own. All and all, a marvelous book that I cannot possibly recommend highly enough.
Marvelous little book.......2001-09-29
Cutting to the chase, the real prize in this marvelous little book are the photographs. For once, we get something other than the usual lot that appear in books with a Wilde connection. Mr. Holland has achieved through his pictures (most seem to be from the family collection) something which most texts don't do..... a feel for the whole of Wilde the man. There is a human dimension to this slim volume that one does not find elsewhere. There are pictures of ancestors, parents, editorial cartoons, advertisements, all in relatively strict chronological order, from the child in a dress (as was customary for little boys in the period) to the student, the developing fop, the lampooned character, the ludicrous pairing with Bosie... who looks perpetually bored and thoroughly uninteresting... to the depressing denouement, death bed and funerary monuments.
The text reveals nothing new but it is elegantly written. Both of Wilde's children were devoted to the memory of their father. It is evident that the grandson was raised in like manner.
Of Wilde's two boys, Cyril died in WWI without issue. Mr. Holland is the grandson of the other, Vyvyan.
If you are interested in the period, England and Ireland in late 19th century, Wilde, gay history, etc. buy this book. It is worth infinitely more than it costs.
Indispensible.......2000-07-26
Aside from the books Wilde actually wrote, this is the one book that should be on the shelf of everyone who loves Oscar. While its biographical story adds nothing new to the facts, the author's palpable sympathy for his grandfather is a welcome change from the cold and critical standard set by most critics of this pivotal genius and the wreckage of his life. More importantly, this small volume, which you can carry in a pocket, constitutes the largest single repository of Wilde memorabilia. Holland begins by lamenting the dissolution and loss of Wilde's scrapbooks and albums in the debtor sale of the author's entire household. By the end of his story his family's loss has taken on its true proportions as a loss to the rightful inheritance of all humankind.
an elegant, intimate scrapbook.......2000-04-23
This elegant little book is the first book about Oscar Wilde that I read and the one that made me fall in love with him. It's filled with beautiful pictures, some of which I haven't seen in other books. Besides the usual public pictures of Oscar, there are photos of personal objects like his wife Constance's wedding ring, letters and pages of manuscript, some in French, that show glimpses of the privet man behind the epigrams. There is enough biographical information to put the pictures in context; I knew very little about Oscar when I first read it and found everything to be quite clear. If you already have Vyvyan Holland's biography of Oscar (which would fit very nicely with this book, filling out the biographical information, as would Richard Ellmann's biography), there are more than enough pictures in this book that are not in Vyvyan Holland's book to make it worth adding to your library.
Book Description
London's Central Criminal Court Sessions Papers for April 1895 were blunt, declaring that "the details of this case are unfit for publication." The case was Oscar Wilde's first trial, a libel action brought against the Marquess of Queensberry for publicly calling him a homosexual. What unfolded in the court was one of Victorian London's most infamous scandals: the great, doomed love affair between Wilde and Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the Marquess's son. When it became public, it cost Wilde everything.
Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson and a noted researcher and archivist, has discovered the original transcript of the trial that led to his grandfather's tragedy. Here for the first time is the true, uncensored record, free of the distortions and censorship of previous accounts.
On 18 February 1895, Bosie's father delivered a note to the Albemarle Club addressed to "Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic]." With Bosie's encouragement, Wilde decided to sue the Marquess for libel. As soon as the trial opened, London's literary darling was at the center of the greatest scandal of his time.
Wilde's fall from grace was swift: having lost this case, he was in turn prosecuted and later imprisoned. Bankrupted, he fled to Paris never to see his family again. Within five years he was dead, his health never having recovered from the years in Reading gaol.
This remarkable book reveals Wilde on trial for his life, though he did not know it -- his confidence ebbing under the relentless cross-questioning, the wit for which he was so celebrated gradually deserting him under the remorseless scrutiny. The tragic climax falls when Wilde is betrayed by his own cleverness, unconsciously playing into the prosecutor's hands. With that his cause is lost.
Customer Reviews:
Life Was A Trial For Oscar Wilde........2004-07-02
Oscar Wilde was a handsome man in 1892, as the photo of him in this books clearly indicates. He was a brilliant playwright and daubled in poetry. However, as the drawing of his arrest at the Cadogan Hotel on April 13, 1895, he was an arrogant, dandified "gentleman." He had been accused of a horrible charge and should have accepted his fate. To crave justice from libel, he laid himself and his reputation open to scrutiny and disaster.
Why his grandson would want all of this sordidness known now is impossible to comprehend. Some things are better left forgotten or not said. Wilde felt that the charge (however right it might be) called for a defense of justification. It turned out to be the opposite as the self-destructive genius only continued to lie with charm, entertaining the audience but not the court.
Those who start libel actions often emerge with their reputations and lives in tatters. Libel actions are meant to be cases for re-establishing reputations, confounding gossip and allowing the litigant to emerge in a state of unblemished purity (John Mortimer). The most famous libel case of all led Oscar Wilde directly to jail. He left behind a devoted wife and two sons. The grandson who released this detailed account of the trial to try to figure out "Why on earth did you do it?"
There are photographs of some of the persons involved and of the evidence used against him. It is proposed that perhaps he really didn't think he had done anything wrong. After all, many important people of that time got away with the same thing of which he was accussed. To learn what it is, you must read this book.
I'd heard rumors about his sexual persuasion previously, but this stuff went a little too far to please my sensibilities. The Judge maintained that men who could do as he did were 'dead to all sense of shame' and declared that this offence was 'the worst I have ever tried.'
Poor Oscar, his ego got in the way; his pride was too great to accept the fact that he had been 'found out.' In going to court, he laid open his past and destroyed his future. He hurt not only himself but his family as well. Why can't people just let the sordid past lay dormant?
A Book to Avoid.......2004-04-27
This is a wonderful book if you are only interested in reading the actual transcript from Oscar's trial. Indeed, the book is excellent in that respect. However, I would say it is a book to avoid if you are a fan of Lord Alfred Douglas. It seems to me that this book, like so many before it, is trying to make Alfred Douglas the scapegoat. There was a reason Bosie wanted Oscar to take his father to trial, they WOULD have won. It was a carefully laid out plan and Oscar, not Bosie, is the one who went astray from it. Lord Alfred was to take the witness box and testify against his father. When he was finished telling all that his father had done, what sort of man he was, they felt sure no jury would side with him. However, just before Bosie was about to take the witness box, Oscar refused to allow him. He knew what it would mean by his refusing to allow Bosie to take the stand, he understood very well what it would mean, but he said Bosie should never have to do such a thing. Lord Alfred himself spent a great deal of time lamenting Oscar's decision, and wondering why on earth he changed his mind. He seems to think that Oscar had been talking to Robert Ross and he and Ross had come up with another plan. Ross however, is a compulsive liar, and was probably the worst person Oscar could have trusted.
Oscar's sons, and his grandsons, lived with a false impression of Robert Ross, and therefore with a false impression of Lord Alfred Douglas. I am sickened that these misconceptions live on even now, so long after their deaths. I am sick of Lord Alfred being made out to be a monster, some evil, wicked boy who destroyed Oscar Wilde. Oscar was a very intelligent man, was he not? Don't you think he knew what he was doing? "I must say to myself that I ruined myself and that no man great or small can be ruined but by his own hand."-Oscar Wilde. I'm just tired of the blame being shoveled solely onto Lord Alfred. He wasn't a monster, and I wish people would stop trying to portray him as if he was one.
An amazing reading experience.......2004-04-14
What's amazing is that, we have heard for many years about the unparalleled wit and charm of Wilde in conversation, yet until now we of course have been denied this experience. Reading these verbatim transcripts, hundreds of pages long and recently unearthed, we are given the opportunity to do this almost virtually, for the Wildean voice comes through loud and clear, with perfect crispness and distinction. This libel trial, the first of three of the Oscar Wilde trials, is almost a conversation between two persons, and the defence counsel, Carson, though incredibly scornful and insolent, is almost as intelligent and quite as good at debate as Wilde, so it's a splendid match of brains. The outcome is disheartening, though, and throughout you can't help pounding the desk and murmuring out loud, oh, Oscar, how could you have been so stupid! Or -- don't go there! So he becomes real in a way he hasn't previously, not even in the best biographies available. Queensberry and Alfred Douglas come off, in hindsight, as monsters of privilege in only quasi-human form. And poor Edward Shelley, it is plain, deserves a book of his own.
A Genuine Tragedy.......2003-12-09
It wasn't a capital trial, but the 1895 libel proceedings of Oscar Wilde against the Marquess of Queensberry were in their way tragic and terrible. Entering the trial, Wilde was a celebrity and a playwright with the magnificently silly _The Importance of Being Ernest_ in successful performance in London and New York. Afterwards, he was pursued, tried, convicted, and imprisoned at hard labor for the then crime of homosexuality. It is a story that has been told many times and turned into dramas. Those of us who love Wilde's writing and outrageous wit will always wonder what would have happened if he had been able to write and live as he wished, instead of being ruined and sent to an early death. Amazingly, the trial record has until now been unavailable. There were summaries, and publication of extracts, but only with _The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde: The First Uncensored Transcript of the Trial of Oscar Wilde vs. John Douglas (Marquess of Queensberry)_, 1895 (Fourth Estate) do we have a full record. In 2000, an anonymous source donated a transcript of the trial to the British Library. It was authenticated, and has now been edited by Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson. Anyone interested in Wilde's life and writing will be fascinated by this verbatim record which puts judge, prosecutor, defender, and of course Wilde himself on the stage of the Old Bailey to play out their roles verbatim.
Holland has a useful introduction to recall the details of how Wilde was snared into legal doom, spurred by his young man Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") to bother Bosie's abominable father Queensberry. When, after several skirmishes, Queensberry left his calling card at Wilde's club, with the words "To Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite" (spelling was one of the Marquess's shortcomings), Wilde should have thrown it into the fire. Instead, egged on by Bosie, he took Queensberry to court for libel. It was the mistake of his life.; as Holland writes, "If I could ask my grandfather a single question, it would have to be, 'Why on earth did you do it?'" Wilde did not take advice that he leave the country, and so sealed his own doom. Most of the pages of this book are the words from the trial, and most of those words come from the bouts with Wilde in the witness box. Initially he seemed to enjoy his role in the events, and gave as good as he got. For much of the repartee reported here, the transcriber notes: "(_laughter_.)" and "(_more laughter_.)" But an eventual flippant answer overthrew Wilde on the stand, although his case could not have been won. When Carson asked about a companion, "Did you ever kiss him?" Wilde replied, "Oh, no, never in my life; he was a peculiarly plain boy." It was not long after that Wilde and his lawyers withdrew the charges, and Queensberry was declared not guilty.
If Queensbury was not guilty of libel, it was reasonable to think that his accusations were truthful, and with the evidence already gathered, Queensberry assisted in a speedy arrest of Wilde, who once again had refused advice that he leave the country. The subsequent trials, one with a hung jury and one finding him guilty of gross indecency, are not covered in this volume. Wilde had two years of hard labor, and three sad years of exile before his death in Paris in 1900. He produced the mordant "Ballad of Reading Gaol" but little else during these years, and while there are plenty of examples that his wit remained in conversation, we were robbed of subsequent examples of the delicious laughter that had come from each of his successively improving plays. This is a useful book as full documentation of the first trial, and Holland has given helpful notes throughout. Those who admire Wilde, however, will find it more than useful. Wilde was brilliant at Greek and admired Greek drama and life, and it is no exaggeration that the transcript of the trial, reading as it does like a piece of period theater, has all the marks of a classic tragedy.
Average customer rating:
- Everything you wanted to know....
- A controversial walk on the Wilde side.
- New Depths of Oscar Wilde's Life
- A magical read
- Dubious book
|
The Secret Life Of Oscar Wilde
Neil McKenna
Manufacturer: Basic Books
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0465044387
Release Date: 2005-05-10 |
Book Description
Drawing on long-lost or overlooked material, this is a major new biography of Wilde's emotional and sexual life-praised by the Manchester Evening News as "Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful"
Oscar Wilde said of himself, "I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my work." Now, for the first time, Neil McKenna focuses on the tormented genius of Wilde's personal life, reproducing remarkable love letters and detailing Wilde's until-now unknown relationships with other men.
McKenna has spent years researching Wilde's life, drawing on extensive new material, including never-before published poems as well as recently discovered trial statements made by male prostitutes and blackmailers about Wilde. McKenna provides explosive evidence of the political machinations behind Wilde's trials for sodomy, as well as his central role in the burgeoning gay world of Victorian London. Dazzlingly written and meticulously researched, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde fully charts Wilde's astonishing odyssey through London's sexual underworld and paints a frank and vivid psychological portrait of a troubled genius.
Customer Reviews:
Everything you wanted to know...........2007-09-03
McKenna has carved his own niche among the Wilde biographies by concentrating on Oscar's homosexuality (too often marginalized or avoided by other writers), with emphasis on his long relationship with Bosie; McKenna considers theirs a great love affair, but it appears to have been something along the lines of codependency. It's quite remarkable how much detail is known about Oscar's antics through letters, journals and books, maybe too much, since this long read is at times a bit tedious as we move through one young man after another. McKenna has a couple of annoying habits as a writer -- all the young men couldn't have been quite as "breathtakingly" attractive as described, he makes a lot of suppositions about what someone must have thought, or might have done, and he's a bit melodramatic with the "but he would find out all too soon" chapter endings.
But these are quibbles. The book is important is several ways. Above all, it portrays Wilde as one of a group of early advocates of gay rights, a fervent believer that society and the law should treat homosexuals with equality and respect. It also provides a fascinating "decoding" of Wilde's most famous works by explaining the double, ie. homosexual, meaning of words, phrases and behavior on the part of his characters, who were often based on real people. The book paints a vivid picture of the seamy side of London's "Uranian" underground of rent boys, petty thieves and blackmailers and the "respectable" men who took their pleasure there. And it delves into his marriage, the ill-fated consequence of having to protect his reputation from the circling vultures.
Wilde is a fascinating, maddening subject, so sure of his own superiority that he considered himself above the law and the strictures of society, making him ultimately the instrument of his own self-destruction. This book will be of interest primarily to Wilde junkies and people interested in the sexual aspect of his life, but it should be read in conjunction with other bios, lest one get the impression that the great man did little but go at it like a rabbit.
A controversial walk on the Wilde side........2007-06-12
"I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china," Oscar Wilde confessed while he was a student at Oxford (p. 14).
For anyone who has visited his lipstick-kissed tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Wilde's "secret life" is really no secret. Wilde (1854-1900) was primarily an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet, known for his brazen wit ("Little boys should be obscene and not heard," p. 257), which made him one of the greatest celebrities of late Victorian London. Following Wilde's death, his friend, Frank Harris, wrote a biography, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, which was followed by H. Montgomery Hyde's 1975 biography, Oscar Wilde: A Biography, and more recently Richard Ellmann's 1987 meticulous work, Oscar Wilde. Whereas these earlier, excellent biographies focused primarily on Wilde's literary achievements and dealt with his sexuality only in passing, Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde examines Wilde's sexuality and sexual behavior in detail--and at times, in graphic detail.
Most biographers concur that Wilde was introduced to homosexuality in 1885, but McKenna speculates--in charting Wilde's "journey" to find his true sexual self (p. xi)--Wilde was first aware of his homosexuality much earlier when he kissed another boy at age 16. After his arrival at Oxford in 1874, Wilde experienced passionate, romantic feelings for Greek beauty (i.e., cultivated, youthful, "fair," "slim" choirboys) (pp. 6-7), but was drawn sexually towards rougher boys. Following his visit to America in 1882, Wilde boasted, "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips." In his struggle against his sexual feelings for young men, Wilde attempted to "cure" his sexuality in 1884 by marrying Constance Lloyd (the daughter of Queen's Counsel Horace Lloyd) and by fathering two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). But he continued to have regular sexual relationships with Robert Baldwin Ross, Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), and random teenage boys, whom he would meet in bars or brothels, culminating in his May, 1895 conviction and two-year imprisonment for "gross indecency." Later, after remarking, "my wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go" (p. 463), Wilde died in Paris, knowing that "he was a martyr in an epic struggle for the freedom of men to love men" (p. 465).
Drawn from interviews, letters, memoirs, journals, and Wilde's own writings--although McKenna's controversial but highly readable biography has been criticised for being too speculative, it nevertheless succeeds in bringing Wilde to life as a literary genius, a dandy, a pagan, an "extreme aesthete" who attempted to live his life by burning hard like a gemlike flame (p. 13), and as a gay Victorian outcast.
G. Merritt
New Depths of Oscar Wilde's Life.......2007-05-21
See the other side of famous author Oscar Wilde with this biography. You'll gain new insight and perspective on his life.
A magical read.......2007-01-25
I bought this book after reading a rave reviews in The Washington Post.
It is everything that it promised to be: brave, fresh, exciting, and
scrupulously researched. I have read most other biographies of Oscar
over the years and really thought that there was little left to say.
McKenna's biography has proved me wrong by proving not a wealth of new
and exciting material, but also a wealth of new insights and
interpretations. I cannot recommend this book too highly - it is a
beautiful and magical read. At the best part of 600 pages, it's a long
book, but for me it wasn't long enough. Incidentally, I don't
understand the comments of the latest reviewer about footnotes. In my
US hardback edition there are nearly 60 pages of notes which
scrupulously source every quote.
Dubious book.......2007-01-13
I have little doubt that Oscar Wilde and Bosie had extraordinary sexual adventures, but one little thing keeps coming back to me: early in this book, the author identifies Ganymede as the Trojan boy whom Zeus abducted and "anally raped."
What was that? Was there a source for that? I flipped to the back of the book, and of course there was no source. It was apparently "just something the author heard on good authority."
I have been involved in gay scholarship for decades and have read dozens of books about Ancient Greece, and this book is absolutely the first place that I have read about Zeus' alleged anal rape of Ganymede.
I will say one thing with absolute certainty: there is no Ancient Greek source which supports the author. Centuries later, getting into Medieval and Renaissance Europe, there may well have been all sorts of tales about Ganymede. He had passed into the popular language: men referred to a handsome boy as some other man's "Ganymede," and from this we ultimately get the word "catamite."
But the actions of the Great God Zeus? He changed himself into an eagle and abducted Ganymede to Mount Olympus to serve as his wine-pourer. Period.
Now, this one little thing may seem to be just that: one little thing. But this book about Oscar Wilde is full of details. And if the author is not trustworthy on the details, then one must wonder about the value of this book.
Not recommended.
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