Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Oscar Wilde
-
Standard Name: Wilde, Oscar
Birth Name: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
OW
's significance as poet, playwright, and writer of prose fiction, remained in eclipse for many years after his notorious trial and imprisonment in Reading Gaol
, events whose chilling impact on poetry and prose in England was not reversed until the modernists returned to the struggle for unfettered aesthetic expression. A leading proponent of art for art's sake in England, OW
was a follower of Walter Pater
, from whose work he borrows in lavish quantity, and, like Pater, he was much influenced by the French l'art pour l'art poets, notably Charles Baudelaire
and Théophile Gautier
.
Clements, Patricia. Baudelaire and the English Tradition. Princeton University Press.
140-83
More recently, his brilliant aesthetic essays have drawn serious attention as the basis for many critical propositions . . . which we like to attribute to more ponderous names.
Ellmann, Richard, editor. The Critic as Artist: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Random House.
x
His notoriety as a casualty of oppressive laws against the practice of homosexuality is also the subject of a good deal of recent critical comment.
Shortly after her wedding, in September 1912, VT
went back to Italy to resume voice training, but difficulty with her throat left her unable to sing. She tried a number of different remedies but none...
Literary responses
Viola Tree
Novelist Ada Leverson
(a close friend of Oscar Wilde
) wrote a parody of VT
's question-and-answer format (from the column, not the book, which appeared after her death), which mocks both VT and the...
Family and Intimate relationships
Edith Templeton
She said years later: In truth, I would have married any Englishman. The marriage turned out badly. One of their rows was provoked by his discovering her in possession of a book by Oscar Wilde
Literary responses
Charlotte Stopes
A more recent Shakespeare scholar, Samuel Schoenbaum
patronisingly attributes her employment by the Athenæum not to her own merit but to a journalistic coup in ingratiating herself with the management.
CSJ
's protagonist here is born illegitimate; his mother is an opera singer. The novel addresses the subject of male homosexual desire; it moves away from Oscar Wilde
's and Aubrey Beardsley
's re-interpretation of...
Textual Production
Dodie Smith
Its title alludes to Oscar Wilde
's A Woman of No Importance.
Grove, Valerie. Dear Dodie: The Life of Dodie Smith. Chatto and Windus.
280
DS
's American publisher, Little, Brown
was shocked at the novel's homosexual content and its likely impact on her readership. They...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
Reviews were almost all positive.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
255
Writing in the Dial in September 1922, T. S. Eliot
used this novel as the most notable example of the psychoanalytical type which, however, he disapproved in principle. Its...
Literary responses
Arabella Shore
Oscar Wilde
offered slightly faint praise. AS
, he wrote, had tried to guide modern readers through Dante's great poem as Virgil
guided Dante through the afterworld, and her modest literary guide-book was unlike many...
Textual Production
Evelyn Sharp
ES
wrote by hand a long letter from Bow Street Police Court to C. P. Scott
, editor of the Manchester Guardian and thus her employer, in the light of her probably fast-approaching incarceration.
The...
Cultural formation
Evelyn Sharp
ES
was an Englishwoman (and asserted that identity in the title of her autobiography) whose mother laid claim to Welsh and to distant Italian forebears. She described her family as urban middle-class, with artistic, musical...
Friends, Associates
Evelyn Sharp
ES
wrote later that at no time in her life did she make intimate friends easily. Most people she had to do with she liked up to a certain point only, but she could count...
Textual Production
Evelyn Sharp
Within a year of reaching Londonon the crest of the wave that was sweeping away Victorian tradition,
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head.
56
ES
found herself attached to the group of writers that had formed around The Yellow Book...
Textual Production
Evelyn Sharp
ES
was sustaining an extremely high rate of publication at the turn of the century. Her books for children included The Other Boy, 1902 (a comment on the sexual panic flowing from the Oscar Wilde
Friends, Associates
Olive Schreiner
In England she also formed close friendships and intellectual bonds with feminist and socialist intellectual Eleanor Marx
, barrister and mathematics professor Karl Pearson
, and socialist pioneer Edward Carpenter
. Others she met in...
Publishing
Martin Ross
MR
and Edith Somerville
first attempted full-scale literary collaboration; that month Oscar Wilde
, editor-elect of The Woman's World, accepted an article by them.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
27 March 1958: The Belgrade Theatre in Coventry was the...
Building item
27 March 1958
The Belgrade Theatre
in Coventry was the first theatre built in Britain after the war.
1966: US cultural critic Susan Sontag published...
Writing climate item
1966
US cultural critic Susan Sontag
published Against Interpretation, her first essay collection. The title piece, On Style, and Notes on Camp (dedicated to Oscar Wilde
and exploring the idea of life as theatre)...
30 November 2000: The age of consent all over Britain was set...
Building item
30 November 2000
The age of consent all over Britain was set at sixteen for either heterosexual or homosexual relations.
14 July 2006: The Bow Street Magistrates Court, one of...
Building item
14 July 2006
The Bow Street Magistrates Court
, one of London's most famous courts, closed after dispensing justice for 267 years.
