Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of Sir William Wilde, a celebrated eye-and-ear surgeon, and Jane Francesca Elgee, a poet who wrote nationalist verse under the pen name Speranza. He took a double first in classics at Trinity College Dublin and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry, fell under the influence of Pater and Ruskin, and adopted the aestheticism — "art for art's sake" — that would become his public costume. In 1882 he toured America for a year lecturing on the decorative arts, telling the customs officer at New York that he had nothing to declare but his genius.

He married Constance Lloyd in 1884; they had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in 1890 and as a revised novel in 1891: the story of a beautiful young man whose portrait ages and corrupts in his stead while he remains physically unmarked by his cruelties. Critics attacked it as immoral; Wilde appended a preface — "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." — and went on to his greatest commercial success, the four society comedies: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), the last a near-perfect machine of comic timing in which two young men invent fictitious relatives to escape their obligations.

In 1891 he had met Lord Alfred Douglas, the beautiful, petulant son of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry. The relationship was open enough that Queensberry left a card at Wilde's club in 1895 accusing him of "posing as a somdomite" [sic]. Wilde, encouraged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. The case collapsed when Queensberry's lawyers produced evidence of Wilde's sexual relationships with young working-class men. Wilde was then prosecuted under the Labouchere Amendment for "gross indecency," convicted at a second trial after the first jury failed to agree, and sentenced in May 1895 to two years' hard labour. He served most of the sentence at Reading Gaol.

He emerged in 1897 bankrupt, broken in health, and ostracised. He wrote two more works of importance — The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and De Profundis, a long letter to Douglas composed in prison and published in expurgated form in 1905. He spent his last years in cheap hotels in Paris under the name Sebastian Melmoth and died there in November 1900 of cerebral meningitis, probably related to an old ear infection. He was forty-six.

Start with The Importance of Being Earnest — it is funnier than its reputation. Then Dorian Gray, then De Profundis, in that order, and the trajectory of a life will be clear.