Oscar Wilde

Life

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in October 1854. His father was a prominent eye and ear surgeon and his mother a poet and Irish nationalist who wrote under the name Speranza. He studied classics at Trinity College Dublin and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and became known for his wit, his dress, and his advocacy of the aesthetic movement’s doctrine of art for art’s sake.

Wilde moved to London, lectured on aesthetics in the United States and Canada in 1882, married Constance Lloyd in 1884, and had two sons. Through the late 1880s he edited a women’s magazine and wrote fairy tales, criticism, and stories. The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, appeared in 1890. His greatest success came in the theater: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) made him the most celebrated playwright in London.

In 1895 he brought a libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, who had accused him of homosexuality. The case collapsed, Wilde was arrested, and he was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. After his release in 1897 he lived in France under an assumed name, published The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and died in Paris in November 1900.

Literary significance

Wilde is remembered as a dramatist of exceptional verbal skill, a critic who argued that criticism is itself a creative art, and a writer whose life has become part of his work. The Importance of Being Earnest is among the most performed comedies in English. The Picture of Dorian Gray, attacked as immoral on publication, is now read as a central text of the decadent 1890s and as a study of the double life, a subject Wilde’s own history gave added weight. His epigrams are quoted more often than those of almost any other English-language writer.

Where to start

The Picture of Dorian Gray is his only novel and the natural entry point in prose. Readers who enjoy its dialogue will find the same voice at full strength in the plays.