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.
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Iris Tree
Writer, critic, and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm was IT 's half-uncle, the youngest son from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's father's second marriage. Best remembered for his drawings and caricatures of the famous, Beerbohm also wrote...
Family and Intimate relationships Viola Tree
Throughout her life, VT took direction from her father, the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , who had abandoned his job in the family corn-trading business to pursue a career on stage, and had changed...
Health Viola Tree
Shortly after her wedding, in September 1912, VT went back to Italy to resume voice training, but difficulty with her throat left her unable to sing. She tried a number of different remedies but none...
Literary responses Viola Tree
Novelist Ada Leverson (a close friend of Oscar Wilde ) wrote a parody of VT 's question-and-answer format (from the column, not the book, which appeared after her death), which mocks both VT and the...
Publishing Katharine Tynan
KT wrote a series of articles on Women of the Poets for Oscar Wilde 's journal The Woman's World
Tynan, Katharine. The Middle Years. Constable.
37
Friends, Associates Katharine Tynan
Among those who frequented KT 's salon were George Russell (Æ), Irish Nationalist and Fenian leader John O'Leary , Gaelic scholar and revivalist Douglas Hyde (founder of the Gaelic League , 1893), and George Sigerson
Literary responses Alison Uttley
The fairy-story volume Mustard, Pepper and Salt, published in October 1938, was much better reviewed than AU had become accustomed to; Books of Today likened the contents to Oscar Wilde 's fairy-tales.
Judd, Denis. Alison Uttley. Michael Joseph.
154
Friends, Associates Ethel Lilian Voynich
Stepniak and his work, including Underground Russia, 1883, were influential in ELV 's personal life and career.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Gray, Anne, and Pam Blevins. The World of Women in Classical Music. WordWorld Publications, pp. 876-7.
876
He taught her Russian, pushed her to continue writing, and was the first to introduce her...
Reception Lucy Walford
LW 's relation Mary was also an acquaintance of an unnamed aunt of Oscar Wilde 's. LW reports the aunt as having had little confidence in her nephew, believing he would never make a name...
Friends, Associates Mary Augusta Ward
She met a number of important writers through her newspaper work. She associated with Alexander Macmillan , Sir George Grove , Edmund Gosse and his wife Ellen , John Morley , and her uncle Matthew Arnold
Literary responses Mary Augusta Ward
The novel was a massive success, in the words of Henry Jamesa momentous public event.
Ward, Mary Augusta. “Introduction”. Robert Elsmere, edited by Rosemary Ashton, Oxford University Press, p. vii - xviii.
vii
Critic John Sutherland deems it the best-selling work of quality fiction in the nineteenth century. By the summer...
Friends, Associates Rosamund Marriott Watson
She forged friendships with other women writers, including Mona Caird , E. Nesbit , Mathilde Blind , Amy Levy , and Alice Meynell . She was also a friend of William Sharp , Austin Dobson
Literary responses Rosamund Marriott Watson
Oscar Wilde 's review of this collection for The Woman's World called RMWone of our most artistic workers in poetry.
Hughes, Linda K. “A Woman Poet Angling for Notice: Rosamund Marriott Watson”. Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880-1930, edited by Marysa Demoor and Marysa Demoor, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 134-55.
139
In 1902William Archer called the collection less mature than her later volumes...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Antonia White
AW longed to be a writer from an early age. At her convent school, aged nearly fourteen, under the influence of illicit reading of Francis Thompson and Wilde 's Dorian Gray, she wrote three...

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