Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and editor. He wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, and The Importance of Being Earnest, a comedy about invented identities and the rules of respectable society.

Wilde is often reduced to a list of clever sayings or to the trials that ended his public career. The books show a wider writer. His fairy tales examine poverty and selfishness; his essays argue about art and political freedom; his comedies expose the arbitrary rules behind marriage and status; his prison writing describes what punishment does to a person.

Dublin, Oxford, and the Aesthetic movement

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. His mother, Jane Wilde, was an Irish nationalist poet who published as Speranza. His father, William Wilde, was an eye and ear surgeon and a writer on Irish archaeology and folklore. Oscar studied classics at Trinity College Dublin and at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

After Oxford, Wilde became a public spokesman for Aestheticism, a movement that argued that art should be valued for beauty and form rather than forced to teach a moral lesson. He lectured in Britain and the United States, edited the magazine The Woman's World, and turned his dress and conversation into parts of a public performance. His essays later made the argument more complex: art does not simply copy life, and criticism can itself be creative work.

Marriage, stories, and The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884. Constance Wilde was a writer, lecturer, and campaigner for women's dress reform, not only the wife of a famous man. They had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. During these years Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates, literary fairy tales written for adults as well as children.

The Picture of Dorian Gray first appeared in a magazine in 1890 and caused hostile reviews because critics saw sexual and moral danger in it. Wilde revised and expanded the story for the 1891 book. Its central device is simple: Dorian Gray remains young while a hidden portrait records age and wrongdoing. The book uses that impossible bargain to ask whether a beautiful public face can be separated from responsibility for private acts.

The plays and Salome in Paris

Between 1892 and 1895, Wilde became one of London's most successful playwrights. Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest use courtship, blackmail, hidden parents, false names, and threatened scandal to reveal how respectable society protects some people and punishes others.

Wilde wrote Salome in French. The one-act tragedy follows Salome as she demands the head of the imprisoned prophet Jokanaan. British censorship prevented the planned London performance because the play represented biblical characters. The French text was published in Paris in 1893, and the first production opened there in 1896 while Wilde was in prison.

Trials, prison, and the law against sex between men

Wilde had a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a British poet. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of posing as a sodomite. Wilde sued him for criminal libel in 1895. The case collapsed when the defense presented evidence about Wilde's sexual relationships with men, and the government then prosecuted Wilde under a law that criminalized sexual acts between men.

After one jury failed to agree, a second trial convicted Wilde of gross indecency. He received two years of imprisonment with hard labor. At Reading Gaol he wrote the long letter later called De Profundis. After release he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a poem about an execution and the damage caused by prison itself.

The final years in France

Wilde left Britain after his release in 1897 and used the name Sebastian Melmoth. He lived in France with little money and spent his final months at the Hôtel d'Alsace, now L'Hotel, at 13 rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Lord Alfred Douglas and Wilde briefly reunited after prison, then separated again.

Oscar Wilde died at the Paris hotel on 30 November 1900. He was forty-six. He was first buried outside central Paris at Bagneux Cemetery. His remains were moved in 1909 to Père Lachaise Cemetery, where the sculptor Jacob Epstein's monument now marks the grave in division 89.