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.
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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 Author name Excerpt
Reception Vernon Lee
This book lost Lee the friendship of others who had admired her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. Broken friendships included those with Oscar Wilde (refigured as the character Posthlethwaite), Jane and William Morris
Reception Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
Following the death of her husband , JFLW wrote to Sir Thomas Larcom , hoping he could help secure her a government pension.
Melville, Joy. Mother of Oscar. John Murray.
143
In his reply, Larcom explained that only the Prime Minister could...
Reception John Oliver Hobbes
The Ambassador proved to be JOH 's most successful dramatic work. On opening night, when the delighted audience called for the author, many of them were staggered at the appearance on stage of a young...
Reception Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
By 16 November 1888, she had also received a grant of £100 from the Royal Literary Fund . Her son Oscar Wilde helped her to secure both pensions.
Melville, Joy. Mother of Oscar. John Murray.
222
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell.
292
Residence John Strange Winter
She became an active member of the community, encouraging English visitors through her writing, and retaining a summer house there even after the family returned to London in 1901. In 1897 the townspeople, appreciative of...
Residence Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
During her early married years, Jane Francesca Wilde lived at 21 Westland Row, Dublin. Some time after the birth of her son Oscar but before 24 November 1855, the family moved to the more...
Textual Features Ella Hepworth Dixon
EHD depicts Oscar Wilde as the jealous, selfish, and corrupt dramatist Gilbert Vincent in The World's Slow Stain. Envious of one-time novelist Adela Buller's marriage to the lover who had formerly rejected her, Gilbert...
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
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 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...
Textual Features Violet Fane
Titles include Hazely Heath (a sonnet which had first appeared in the inaugural issue of Wilde 's The Woman's World in November 1887) and The Mer-Baby (which Wilde persuaded her to contribute in August 1888)...
Textual Features Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The slight psychological interest of this story is overshadowed, however, by a fascination with Helen's rescuer, aesthete and poet Daniel Lester, who in his larger-than-life physical presence and flamboyant personality is patently Wilde . Lester...
Textual Features Nancy Cunard
In fact, it was part of the effort of the early modernists to break free of the cosy escapism which had befallen English verse after the trial of Oscar Wilde . The Wheels group took...

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