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.
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.
Who Was Who in Literature, 1906-1934. Gale Research.
vol. 1
She also belonged to the Society of Authors
, and acted as a steward (along with over a hundred other luminaries including Walter Besant
Leisure and Society
Kate Marsden
Scholars argue that the destruction of KM
's reputation was completed by private knowledge of her erotic relationships with women. Hewett
not only spread information to Hapgood
about these relationships, but also ensured that Henry Labouchere
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
was a presence in the early poetry of Wordsworth
and Coleridge
, though they later distanced themselves from her so emphatically. Her work appeared in magazines in the USA before the end of the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Brigid Brophy
One of the twelve sections is no more fifty words. The novel's decadent style inhabits the minds of several characters, particularly that of the tall, fragile, perpetually exhausted but secretly sexually voracious Antonia Mount. Her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michael Field
From 1890 (when they were introduced to Walter Pater
and attended, along with Oscar Wilde
and Arthur Symons
, a lecture he gave) Katharine and Edith were deeply influenced in their writing by Pater.
Field, Michael, and William Rothenstein. Works and Days. Editors Moore, Thomas Sturge and D. C. Sturge Moore, J. Murray.
119-20
Intertextuality and Influence
Ada Leverson
AL
's style and reputation are bound up with those of Oscar Wilde
. Her biographer Charles Burkhart
accepts that Wilde was the catalyst of her writing career, though he insists that she does not...
Intertextuality and Influence
Natalie Clifford Barney
A brief encounter with Oscar Wilde
in early childhood made a deep impression on NCB
. In an interview near the end of her life, she said, when at fifteen I read Oscar Wilde's short...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ada Leverson
This dialogue brings together several fictional characters, including Wilde
's Salome, Ibsen
's Nora, Pinero
's Mrs Tanqueray, and Madame Santuzza from Mascagni
's opera Cavalleria Rusticana.
Burkhart, Charles. Ada Leverson. Twayne.
69
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ada Leverson
The First World War is an important theme in this novel; Edith Ottley's guests find it hard to talk about anything else. Aylmer has returned into Edith's life as a wounded war hero. She decides...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
Elgee's translation gained this novel a wider audience. In later years Dante Gabriel Rossetti
developed a positive passion for it, and it became very popular with the Pre-Raphaelites
.
Murray, Isobel. “Sidonia the Sorceress: Pre-Raphaelite Cult Book”. Durham University Journal, Vol.
The title-page quotes And each man kills the thing he loves . . . , from Wilde
's recent The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The title comes from a phrase applied by a snobbish...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mathilde Blind
MB
's rendering contributed to making the journal a sensation in England, and a major influence on a generation and more of English journal writers, including Katherine Mansfield
. It is, indirectly, the inspiration for...
