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.
Following her early conquest of Tennyson
, AM
went on to develop a large circle of literary acquaintances. Callers on the Meynells at Palace Court included Irish writer Katharine Tynan
, Aubrey Beardsley
(while he...
Publishing
Alice Meynell
AM
stopped publishing with John Lane
after Oscar Wilde
's conviction.
Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. University Press of Virginia .
172
Literary responses
Constance Naden
William R. Hughes
provided for the Midland Naturalist a review of this book which CN
called kind.
Hughes, William Richard et al. Constance Naden: A Memoir. Bickers and Son.
38-9
. The Woman's World (edited by Oscar Wilde
) gave the book one of its several...
Intertextuality and Influence
Constance Naden
Oscar Wilde
paid a tribute of sorts to CN
in his comic short story The Canterville Ghost: A Hylo-Idealistic Romance, 1887, about a determinedly materialist American family's encounter with an actual ghost of a...
Literary responses
E. Nesbit
When EN
asked Bernard Shaw
to review the first Lays and Legends for To-Day, he responded with a pretend review contained in a letter, a masterpiece in faint praise: The author has a fair...
Textual Features
E. Nesbit
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
Family and Intimate relationships
Charlotte O'Conor Eccles
Sir William Wilde
, husband of Jane Francesca
and father of Oscar
, was a connection by marriage as well as a family friend.
She did not, however, have enough money. Oscar Wilde
took it upon himself to organize a fundraising drive to discharge her unpaid bill at the Langham Hotel
. As late as June, Vernon Lee
reported...
Homosexuals in British fiction had been portrayed mostly as sick, funny, or both since the Oscar Wilde
trials (1895). E. M. Forster
had kept his Maurice unpublished. Radclyffe Hall
had run into trouble. Virginia Woolf
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Richardson
Odle illustrated editions of Voltaire
's Candide, Swift
's Gulliver's Travels, Wilde
's The Sphinx, and Twain
's 1601, among others; his images also appeared in such periodicals as The Gypsy...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Rigby
Scholars Mitchell
and Broomfield
observe that like Kant
before her and Oscar Wilde
after, Eastlake sought to define a realm of human experience to and for which only art could speak, whereas Ruskin believed that...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Robins
ER
's first few years in London brought her into contact with several important literary and theatre figures, including Henry James
, Oscar Wilde
, actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree
, and actress Ellen Terry
...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Robins
Both Sides of the Curtain covers ER
's relations with the theatre knights Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
and Sir Henry Irving
. According to Woolf (who found it a fascinating book, despite its portraits of...