OSCAR WILDE: A Life in Letters [ePub edition]

Wilde the writer is known to us from his plays and prose fiction, yet it was in his conversation that his genius reached its summit. His talk is lost, his autobiography was never written, but his letters reveal him at his spontaneous, sparkling best. Of all nineteenth-century letter writers Oscar Wilde is, predictably, one of the most brilliant. Wonderfully fluent in style, the letters bear that most familiar of Wildean hallmarks – the lightest of touches for the most serious of subjects. He comments openly on his life and his work from the early years of undergraduate friendship, through his year-long lecture tour in America as a striving young ‘Professor of Aesthetics’, to the short period of fame and success in the early 1890s, when he corresponded with many leading political, literary and artistic figures of the time. Disgrace and imprisonment followed, but even in adversity his humour does not desert him. In this beautifully produced volume Merlin Holland has brought together his most revealing letters with an illuminating commentary. Together they form the closest thing we shall ever have to Wilde’s own memoir.

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IRISH PEACOCK AND SCARLET MARQUESS: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde

Release date: 19th Jan 2004

Author: Merlin Holland

'As good as being in the gallery. Enthralling.' Peter Ackroyd, The Times The original transcript of the famous Wilde vs Queensberry trial, containing previously unseen details and exchanges. With extensive footnotes and a new introduction, this definitive account is a dramatic read that will delight Wilde enthusiasts and the general reader.