Kultur

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, 1854-1900.

Irish author and wit.

Oscar Wilde is most famous for his sophisticated, brilliantly witty plays. He was born in Dublin as the second son of the surgeon Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, well-known author under the pseudonym Speranza. Wilde studied at Trinity College, Dublin and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself for his scholarship and wit, and also for his eccentricity in dress, taste and manners. Influenced by the aesthetic teachings of Walter Pater and John Ruskin, Wilde became the centre of a group that glorified beauty for itself alone, l'art pour l'art. His first published work, Poems (1881), was well received. The next year he lectured to great acclaim in the United States. In 1884 Oscar Wilde married Constance Lloyd; they had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.

Wilde began writing for magazines and edited Woman's World. The 1890's was the most successful and at the same time most dramatic decade in Wilde's life. All of his most popular works were published during those years. First was a collection of fairy tales, The Happy Prince (1888). Then came a collection of short stories, Lord Arthur Savile's crime and Other Stories, and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, both in 1891. Dorian Gray embodies aesthetic ideals and demonstrates that art has little or nothing to do with ethics. Wilde's creative genius found its highest expression in his plays Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and the masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which were all very clever and filled with pithy epigrams and paradoxes. The Importance of Being Earnest is the most cited play in English, except for Hamlet. Wilde also wrote two historical tragedies, The Duchess of Padua (1892) and Salomé (1893).

Wilde was the most admired wit in his time, a popular guest at every major party in late-Victorian London. Hosts expected him to entertain - and shock - the other guests with witty remarks. Oscar Wilde never failed to meet their expectations, and his inspiration seemed endless.

But all was lost when Wilde was accused of homosexual practices by the marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde?s young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour for "gross indecency". His time in prison inspired the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). When Wilde was released from prison he had lost his reputation, his money and most of his friends. His wife denied him access to his sons and changed their last name to Holland. Wilde went to France and died in Paris in 1900. His literary executor published the apologia De Profundis posthumously in 1905.

The Andrén collection holds 150 editions of works by Oscar Wilde. It also contains 190 biographies on Wilde. His time, Victorian society and its literature are well represented in the collection. Most of the material is in English, but it also contains literature in Swedish, German and French.

oscarwilde.com

The Princess Grace Irish Library of Monaco

Oscariana

Oscar Wilde homepage

Google Books - Oscar Wilde