Oscar Wilde

About this figure

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet, playwright, and novelist celebrated in his own lifetime for his wit and epigrammatic style, and remembered since both for his literary achievement and for the criminal trials that destroyed his career and health. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and then at Oxford, where he excelled academically while cultivating a public persona built around aestheticism -- the doctrine that art should be valued for beauty alone rather than moral or social utility -- he became a celebrity lecturer and society figure in London years before his major literary works appeared.

Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), told the story of a man who remains eternally young while a portrait of him visibly absorbs the marks of his moral corruption, and it drew controversy on publication for its perceived decadence and homoerotic undertones. His dramatic gift emerged fully in a run of society comedies in the early 1890s, including Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance, and, most enduringly, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), a farce built almost entirely from paradox and verbal wit that remains among the most frequently performed English-language plays. His critical essays, collected in Intentions, and his fairy tales for children, collected as The Happy Prince and Other Tales, showed the same commitment to style as his plays, while his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism argued, somewhat surprisingly for a writer associated with high society, for a form of individualist socialism that would free people from the compulsions of poverty and property alike.

At the height of his success, in 1895, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his intimate friend Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel after Queensberry accused him of homosexuality; the case collapsed and exposed evidence that led to Wilde's own prosecution and conviction for gross indecency under British law. He served two years of hard labor, an experience that broke his health and finances, and while imprisoned he wrote De Profundis, a long, anguished letter to Douglas mixing personal recrimination with reflections on suffering and spiritual transformation, published only after his death and in a fuller form decades later. Released in 1897, Wilde left Britain for France, where he lived in poverty and declining health under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, and died in Paris in 1900 at forty-six.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.