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.
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...
Field, Michael. “Introduction”. Sight and Song; with, Underneath the Bough, edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Ian Small, Woodstock Books.
Wilde had written to the authors with casting advice. He suggested they should have the theatre's founder, J. T. Grein
Textual Production
Evelyn Sharp
Within a year of reaching Londonon the crest of the wave that was sweeping away Victorian tradition,
Sharp, Evelyn. Unfinished Adventure. John Lane, Bodley Head.
56
ES
found herself attached to the group of writers that had formed around The Yellow Book...
Textual Production
Marghanita Laski
The programme considered contemporary political and social subjects through the lens of historical and classical literary texts by, for instance Shakespeare
, Byron
, Shaw
, and Wilde
. It was shown on Sunday evenings.
Lewisohn, Mark. “Dig This Rhubarb”. The bbc.co.uk Guide to Comedy.
Textual Production
Evelyn Sharp
ES
was sustaining an extremely high rate of publication at the turn of the century. Her books for children included The Other Boy, 1902 (a comment on the sexual panic flowing from the Oscar Wilde
Textual Production
Sybille Bedford
SB
began reviewing for the New York Review of Books by 1963, and covered a wide range of genres: literary history (a book on Oscar Wilde
), fiction (Graham Greene
), travel writing (...
Textual Production
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
Biographer Joy Melville
notes that a bibliography of Swedenborg's work lists Speranza as the translator but, pages later denies her this role. In his biography of Oscar Wilde
, Richard Ellmann
credits her with the...
Textual Production
Dodie Smith
Its title alludes to Oscar Wilde
's A Woman of No Importance.
Grove, Valerie. Dear Dodie: The Life of Dodie Smith. Chatto and Windus.
280
DS
's American publisher, Little, Brown
was shocked at the novel's homosexual content and its likely impact on her readership. They...
Textual Production
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
While pregnant with her second son this year, she found writing a difficult fit with her family life. She expressed in her letters a suspicion that her heart had cooled down into such a dull...
Textual Production
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
MEB
published (as M.E. Braddon) her novel The Rose of Life, which fictionalises aspects of the life and trial of her friend Oscar Wilde
.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
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)...
27 March 1958: The Belgrade Theatre in Coventry was the...
Building item
27 March 1958
The Belgrade Theatre
in Coventry was the first theatre built in Britain after the war.
1966: US cultural critic Susan Sontag published...
Writing climate item
1966
US cultural critic Susan Sontag
published Against Interpretation, her first essay collection. The title piece, On Style, and Notes on Camp (dedicated to Oscar Wilde
and exploring the idea of life as theatre)...
30 November 2000: The age of consent all over Britain was set...
Building item
30 November 2000
The age of consent all over Britain was set at sixteen for either heterosexual or homosexual relations.
14 July 2006: The Bow Street Magistrates Court, one of...
Building item
14 July 2006
The Bow Street Magistrates Court
, one of London's most famous courts, closed after dispensing justice for 267 years.
