Oscar Wilde
by Richard Ellmann
Summary
Richard Ellmann's biography follows Oscar Wilde from his Dublin childhood, the son of a prominent eye surgeon and a poet mother who wrote under the name Speranza, through a dazzling academic career at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, and into the years he spent as the country's most visible champion of aestheticism, lecturing across North America on the idea that art needed no justification beyond its own beauty. The book follows Wilde's marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884 and the birth of their two sons, then the extraordinary run of society comedies, including Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, that made him London's most celebrated playwright by the early 1890s even as his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas deepened.
Ellmann follows the catastrophe of 1895 in close detail: Wilde's libel suit against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, which collapsed into evidence that led directly to Wilde's own arrest, two criminal trials, and a conviction for gross indecency that sent him to two years of hard labor. The book follows Wilde's writing in prison, including the long letter later published as De Profundis, and his final years of poverty and exile in France, where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol before settling in Paris, where he died in 1900 at forty six, having never returned to Britain or Ireland.
Ellmann, who had already written the standard biography of James Joyce, worked from decades of research and brings the same patient, exhaustive method to Wilde, and reading the book means following both the wit that made Wilde famous and the legal and social machinery that destroyed him, presented with equal weight. It suits a reader who wants Wilde's rise and fall told in full, by a biographer who trusted his subject's own words as much as any archive.
Historical Context & Significance
Ellmann finished the manuscript shortly before he died in Oxford in May 1987; the book appeared in Britain later that year and from Knopf in the United States in 1988, so its major honors, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, were both awarded after his death. That year's finalists were Peter Gay for Freud: A Life for Our Time, Arnold Rampersad for the second volume of his Langston Hughes biography, and Neil Sheehan for A Bright Shining Lie.
The philosopher Ray Monk called it a rich, fascinating biography that succeeds in understanding another person, and it has long been considered the definitive Wilde biography, even though the scholar Horst Schroeder later published a volume of corrections addressing factual errors introduced by Ellmann's rushed final work. It remains the biography against which every later life of Wilde is measured.