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.
The Jewish press was outraged by what it saw as the antisemitism of this novel. The Jewish Chronicle did not review it, but implied strong disapprobation in an article entitled Critical Jews. The Jewish...
Literary responses
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
The future JFLW
's early verse inspired many to submit articles to the Nation.
Wyndham, Horace. Speranza. T. V. Boardman.
27-8
Charles Duffy
described her writing as a substantial force in Irish politics, the vehement will of a woman of...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
Reviews were almost all positive.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
255
Writing in the Dial in September 1922, T. S. Eliot
used this novel as the most notable example of the psychoanalytical type which, however, he disapproved in principle. Its...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
During the early part of ICB
's career she was little regarded or understood. Raymond Mortimer
was one of the first to perceive her quality, and she quickly began to attract the attention of younger...
Literary responses
Amy Levy
After AL
's premature death, much comment focussed on the possible causes of her suicide. But some critics focussed on her writing, notably Oscar Wilde
in The Woman's World. To write thus at six-and-twenty...
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...
Literary responses
Sarah Grand
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.
Oscar Wilde
wrote to request a copy so that he could review it for The Woman's World.
Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Editor Hart-Davis, Rupert, Rupert Hart-Davis.
238
Literary responses
Victoria Cross
Sewell Stokes
, in a brief portrait of VC
in 1928, described her as one who had at one time been accused of poisoning the purity of British homes with her sordid writings ....
Literary responses
Violet Fane
Oscar Wilde
called Hazely Heatha beautiful gem.
Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Editor Hart-Davis, Rupert, Rupert Hart-Davis.
211
According to Dorothea Mosley Thompson
's entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, many of these poems address the trite themes of the period (which...
Literary responses
Florence Farr
Dorothy Shakespear
commented on the novel in a letter to Ezra Pound
: Such a Sargasso Sea muddle. Every body divorced several times, & in the end going back to their originals: & a young...
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...
Literary responses
Michael Field
In a letter, George Meredith
called MF
's characterization of Mary an arresting study..
Field, Michael, and William Rothenstein. Works and Days. Editors Moore, Thomas Sturge and D. C. Sturge Moore, J. Murray.
71
He said he hoped that neither woman had been wounded by a most unjust review in the press.
Field, Michael, and William Rothenstein. Works and Days. Editors Moore, Thomas Sturge and D. C. Sturge Moore, J. Murray.
70
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.
