Oscar Wilde

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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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Amy Levy
The Jewish press was outraged by what it saw as the antisemitism of this novel. The Jewish Chronicle did not review it, but implied strong disapprobation in an article entitled Critical Jews. The Jewish...
Literary responses Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
The future JFLW 's early verse inspired many to submit articles to the Nation.
Wyndham, Horace. Speranza. T. V. Boardman.
27-8
Charles Duffy described her writing as a substantial force in Irish politics, the vehement will of a woman of...
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 Ivy Compton-Burnett
During the early part of ICB 's career she was little regarded or understood. Raymond Mortimer was one of the first to perceive her quality, and she quickly began to attract the attention of younger...
Literary responses Amy Levy
After AL 's premature death, much comment focussed on the possible causes of her suicide. But some critics focussed on her writing, notably Oscar Wilde in The Woman's World. To write thus at six-and-twenty...
Literary responses Rosamund Marriott Watson
Oscar Wilde 's review of this collection for The Woman's World called RMWone of our most artistic workers in poetry.
Hughes, Linda K. “A Woman Poet Angling for Notice: Rosamund Marriott Watson”. Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880-1930, edited by Marysa Demoor and Marysa Demoor, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 134-55.
139
In 1902William Archer called the collection less mature than her later volumes...
Literary responses Sarah Grand
Elaine Showalter brought SG to the attention of late-twentieth-century New Woman and feminist criticism in A Literature of Their Own, 1977, where she discussed The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book.
Mangum, Teresa. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel. University of Michigan Press.
220
Since...
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.
Schoenbaum, Samuel. Shakespeare’s Lives. Clarendon Press.
640
She wrote, according to...
Occupation Ella D'Arcy
As well as a writer, EDA was an editor, assistant to Henry Harland on the avant-garde Yellow Book, published by John Lane of the Bodley Head . Sources agree on this, though she herself...
Occupation Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
She became so well-known as a writer that during her son Oscar 's 1882 American tour he was heralded simply as Speranza's Son.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research.
199: 298
In later years, when his literary fame increased, she...
Occupation Marie Corelli
From 1886, when she published her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, onward, MC produced books at great speed. She was an instant success, and throughout her life she sold approximately 100,000 books...
politics Julia Ward Howe
In 1882 Oscar Wilde , making his lecture tour of the USA, spoke at the Boston Music Hall. While he was in Boston he made several visits to the Howe residence, and he also...
politics Josephine Butler
Even after her retirement from an active public life, JB continued to be interested in a number of international causes. She supported Home Rule in Ireland (two bills for which were defeated in 1886); she...
Author summary Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney , though American, is best known as a Paris salonnière. She specialized in memoirs and pensées, though she also produced poetry, drama, novels, essays, and dialogues. Writing primarily in French but also...
Author summary Ada Leverson
AL has been best remembered for her association with Oscar Wilde . But her six novels have never disappeared from public view or critical appreciation, and today interest has also developed in her journalism: stories...

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