Oscar Wilde

779 Pages·1988·6.75 MB·English

by  Richard Ellmann

PRAISE FOR OSCAR WILDE
BY RICHARD ELLMANN
“So brilliant is Ellmann’s account of Wilde’s morning and afternoon that dusk seems to fall
swiftly and angrily.… Ellmann is our foremost literary biographer.… Wilde’s life was a work of
art, and so is this biography.”
—Stephen Becker, Chicago Sun-Times
“Written with consummate elegance and grace.”
—Denis Donoghue, New Republic
“Monumental.”
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
“The best literary biography of the decade—the best written and the juiciest.”
—Edmund White
“A splendid biography … Mr. Ellmann’s interpretations of Wilde’s essays, stories, poems, plays,
letters and conversation—filled with ‘pontifical impudence,’ much of it still astonishingly
brilliant and unfailingly funny without being cruel—enlarge this excellent book.”
—Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal
“The best book of this or many a year … Wilde is brought unforgettably to life with his curious
courage, his longing for self-destruction, his vulnerability and his irresistible charm.”
—John Mortimer
“Enthralling.”
—Manchester Guardian
“A work of biographic art … This portrait of the Victorian Age’s most tragic figure surpasses
Ellmann’s well-known life of Joyce.”
—Leon Edel
ALSO BY
RICHARD ELLMANN
Yeats: The Man and the Masks
The Identity of Teats
James Joyce
Eminent Domain
Ulysses on the Liffey
Golden Codgers
The Consciousness of Joyce
Four Dubliners

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1988
Copyright © 1987 by The Estate of Richard Ellmann
Copyright © 1984 by Richard Ellmann
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the
United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd., London, in
1987 and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1988.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Merlin Holland for permission to use previously published and
unpublished material by or relating to Oscar Wilde that is in the copyright of the Holland family.
“Oscar Wilde at Oxford,” by Richard Ellmann, was originally published in THE NEW YORK REVIEW
OF BOOKS.
Owing to limitations of space, all other acknowledgments of permission to use previously published
material will be found following the index.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ellmann, Richard, 1918–
Oscar Wilde.
Bibliography: p.
1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854—1900—Biography.
2. Authors, Irish—19th century—Biography.
I. Title.
[PR5823.E38 1988b] 828′.809 [B] 88-40040
eISBN: 978-0-80415112-2
v3.1
To Lucy Ellmann
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
BEGINNINGS
I Toil of Growing Up
II Wilde at Oxford
III Rome and Greece
IV An Incomplete Aesthete
ADVANCES
V Setting Sail
VI Declaring His Genius
VII Indoctrinating America
VIII Countering the Renaissance
IX Two Kinds of Stage
X Mr and Mrs Wilde
EXALTATIONS
XI Disciple to Master
XII The Age of Dorian
XIII Hellenizing Paris
XIV A Good Woman, and Others
XV A Late Victorian Love Affair
XVI Sailing into the Wind
DISGRACE
XVII ‘I Am the Prosecutor in This Case’
XVIII Doom Deferred
XIX Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading
XX Escape from Reading
EXILE
XXI Prisoner at Large
XXII The Leftover Years
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
Appendix A
Appendix B
About the Author
Permissions Acknowledgments
Illustrations appear following pages this page, this page, this page, and this page