Oscar Wilde

(1854–1900). Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde wrote some of the finest comedies in the English language, including Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was also known for his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Wilde was a great conversationalist and a man of wide learning, but his life ended in disgrace and poverty.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. His father was Ireland’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.

Wilde attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Ireland (now Northern Ireland), from 1864 to 1871. He then received a series of scholarships for college. He attended Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, from 1871 to 1874 and then Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in England from 1874 to 1878. Before he graduated with honors, he received Oxford’s Newdigate Prize for his long poem, Ravenna. He then settled in London, England.

Wilde wrote and published nearly all his major work in the 1890s. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890. The next year it appeared in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters. The novel follows the life of a young man who purchases eternal youth at the expense of his soul. The book caused a stir, with critics labeling it immoral.

Intentions (1891), consisting of previously published essays, restated Wilde’s aesthetic attitude toward art. That same year Wilde published two volumes of stories and fairy tales: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates.

Wilde found his greatest successes, however, with his plays, which were society comedies. He injected witty dialogue into conventional plots filled with social intrigues. Many of his works involve the exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and the consequent disgrace. His first success was Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892. The comedy of manners depicts a mother saving her daughter from scandal by an act of generosity that ruins her own chances. In the same year the censor halted rehearsals of Wilde’s macabre play Salomé—which Wilde wrote in French—because it contained biblical characters. It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations.

A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance, was produced in 1893. The play revolves around a woman who is left on her own to raise a son. When the son’s father reenters the picture years later, the woman turns the tables and scorns him. Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were produced early in 1895. In An Ideal Husband Wilde mocks both marriage and idealized love. Scholars often cite The Importance of Being Earnest as Wilde’s greatest dramatic achievement. The play, a satire of Victorian social hypocrisy, revolves around two men who use deception when it suits their purposes.