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.
Salome and the Head deals quite revealingly with female sexual experience. It is set at Yalding on the Medway. Sandra, its heroine, a dancer famous for her rendering of Wilde
's Salome (to Strauss
Textual Features
Natalie Clifford Barney
In L'amour défenduNCB
defends the proposition that only love is important, not the sex to whom it is directed.
Barney, Natalie Clifford, and Karla Jay. A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney. Translator Anna Livia, New Victoria Publishers.
85
She argues that every person possesses both masculine and feminine principles: We should not...
Textual Features
Christopher St John
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 Features
Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW
's leadership and personal aesthetics steered the periodical towards the arts, while still keeping intact established columns on domestic topics, such as gardening, needlework, cookery and fashion.
Hughes, Linda K. “A Female Aesthete at the Helm: Sylvia’s Journal and ’Graham R. Tomson’, 1893-1894”. Victorian Periodical Review, Vol.
29
, No. 2, pp. 173-92.
175
Pages teemed with poetry and fiction...
Textual Production
Katherine Mansfield
Stories she designed for particular sets of readers around this time, especially those for the Fabian New Age, show the edge of professionalism. She had already written bowdlerised versions of Baudelaire
and Wilde
...
Textual Production
Louisa May Alcott
LMA
's writings were often printed serially before their volume publication. Periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Saturday Evening Gazette, the Christian Union, the Boston Commonwealth, the Flag of our...
Textual Production
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
continued after this to maintain a rate of about one new novel a year. In Gerard, which appeared in 1891, she combined elements from Goethe
's Faust with others from Balzac
's La...
Textual Production
Ada Leverson
The Green Carnation, a novel caricaturing Oscar Wilde
, appeared anonymously and was thought by Wilde to be by AL
: its author was actually Robert Hichens
.
Burkhart, Charles. Ada Leverson. Twayne.
22
Textual Production
Ada Leverson
AL
wrote to T. S. Eliot
(editor of The Criterion) offering him an essay on Wilde
, something on Proust
, and a short story, The Consultation.
Wyndham, Violet. The Sphinx and Her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson 1862-1933. A. Deutsch.
93
Textual Production
Ngaio Marsh
NM
's mother
played the witch, and her grandfather Edward William Seager
made a present to her of two theatrical treasures: a book entitled Actors of the [Nineteenth] Century by Frederic White
and a shirt...
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...
Textual Production
Henry James
He had been too anxious to attend his own play, and arrived at the theatre only as the curtain fell, having attended instead a performance of Oscar Wilde
's An Ideal Husband. He wrote...
