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, 1985.
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, 1969.
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.
"Oscar Wilde" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Oscar_Wilde_%281854-1900%29_1889%2C_May_23._Picture_by_W._and_D._Downey.jpg.
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, 1933.
119-20
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...
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
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, 1973.
69
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Renault
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
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
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...
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
Marjorie Bowen
MB
recalls being influenced at an early age by her enjoyment of Tennyson
's Idylls of the King, Wilde
's Picture of Dorian Gray, the novels of Sir Walter Scott
, and Richardson
Intertextuality and Influence
Marie Corelli
The novel is an indictment of the Decadent Movement for its immorality and sensationalism, yet critic Annette R. Federico
notes that the antidecadent novel is packaged as the very flower of decadence, even down to...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Egerton
GE
's realism was influenced by the Scandinavian authors she had read while living in Norway, including Ibsen
, Strindberg
, and Björnson
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman. Manchester University Press, 1997.
193-4
Mix, Katherine Lyon. A Study in Yellow: The Yellow Book and Its Contributors. Greenwood Press, 1969.
173
Yet her work was also informed by the...
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
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
.
qtd. in
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
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...
