Tribute to Oscar Wilde
Wonderfully Wilde
acquitted. But the Liberal
government stepped in and there was another trial. Three months after the
successful opening of The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to a two-year
prison term of hard labor in the Reading Gaol outside of London. After he was released, he was emotionally and
financially drained. Needless to say,
his wife and kids disowned him. Wilde escaped to France and the only notable
thing he wrote was about his experience in prison, a poem called “The Ballad of
Reading Gaol.” At the age of 46, Wilde
died of cerebral meningitis. He is
buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery
in Paris.
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie
Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854.
He was a multi-talented and wildly popular witty writer and lecturer. He
wrote everything from fairy tales to poems and plays, as well as one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Oscar Wilde was a husband
and father of two boys, and he was gay, a well-known secret. When he was professionally at the top of his
game, he had an affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. Unfortunately, Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, found out and was not too pleased. Alfred’s angry dad left
Oscar a nasty little calling card on which he called him a sodomite, though in
his outrage he misspelled it as somdomite.
Oscar took offense to the slur and sued the marquis for libel—a
life-changing error on his part. He
should have let it go, let it go, or at least known the importance of having a
good attorney. During the trial Daddy Douglas’s sneaky lawyer turned attention
to Wilde’s alter-lifestyle. Exhibits A and B were revealing homosexual passages
from his works and love letters to Bosie. A collective gasp ricocheted through
the courtroom like a bullet; order was restored; the libel suit was dismissed;
and Oscar Wilde was arrested for “gross indecency.” Wilde was
Besides
his two works mentioned above I also read his amusing short story The Canterville Ghost, which I
just loved. Click on the title to read about the story and to take a quick quiz
about Oscar Wilde.
The Picture of Dorian Gray was nominated for The Great American Read. Read it and see if you agree with actress and political activist, Cynthia Nixon, that this deserves to be America's most beloved novel!
Happy Reading!
Annette
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