Oscar Wilde : A Life

The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human— account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life. "Simply the best modern biography of Wilde." — Evening Standard Drawing on material that has come to light in the past thirty years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us Wilde's own experience as he experienced it. Here, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; a dreamy, aloof boy; a stellar classicist at boarding school; a born entertainer with a talent for comedy and a need for an audience; his years at Oxford, a brilliant undergraduate punctuated by his reckless disregard for authority . . . his arrival in London, in 1878, "already noticeable everywhere" . . . his ten-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, the father of two boys; Constance unwittingly welcoming young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers, and dying in exile at the age of thirty-nine . . . Wilde's development as a playwright. . . becoming the high priest of the aesthetic movement; his successes . . . his celebrity. . . and in later years, his irresistible pull toward another—double—life, in flagrant defiance and disregard of England's strict sodomy laws ("the blackmailer's charter"); the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years at hard labor, destroying his life and shattering his soul. Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Proem The Star Child A Small Unruly Boy A Fair Scholar Foundation Scholarship The Nightingale and the Rose Young Oxford Heart’s Yearnings Hellas! Specially Commended The Happy Prince A Dream of Fair Women The Jester and the Joke Up to Snuff An English Poet The Remarkable Rocket The Best Place Go Ahead The Wide Great World Bully Boy Different Aspects The Dream of a Poet The Devoted Friend Over the Seine First Drama Man of the Day New Relations In Black and White L'Amour de l'Impossible Women’s World A Study in Green The Young King A Man in Hew A Bad Case Suggestive Things The Best Society The Dance of the Seven Veils Charming Ball White and Gold The Selfish Giant The Eternal Quest for Beauty Feasting with Panthers Brief Summer Months Enemies of Romance Scarlet Marquess A Capacity for Being Amused The House of Judgment The Last First Nights Hideous Words The Prosecutor Regina Versus Wilde The Torrent of Prejudice In Carcere et Vinculis The Head of Medusa The System From the Depths The Fisherman and His Soul Asylum Artistic Work Outcast Men Bitter Experience The Teacher of Wisdom The Parisian Temple of Pleasure Going South All Over L'Envoi Abbreviations Used in the Notes Notes Index