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Book Home  Famous Authors Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was the second son born into an Anglo-Irish family, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, to Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Francesca Wilde . Jane was a successful writer, being a poet for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and a life-long Irish nationalist. Sir William was Ireland's leading Oto-Ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services to medicine. William also wrote books on archaeology and folklore. He was a renowned philanthropist, and his dispensary for the care of the city's poor, in Lincoln Place at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road.
In June 1855, the family moved to 1 Merrion Square in a fashionable residential area, where Wilde's sister, Isola, was born in 1856. Here, Lady Wilde held a regular Saturday afternoon salon with guests including Sheridan le Fanu, Samuel Lever, George Petrie, Isaac Butt and Samuel Ferguson. Wilde was educated at home up to the age of nine. He attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Fermanagh from the ages of nine to sixteen, spending the summer months with his family in rural Waterford, Wexford and at Sir William's family home in Mayo. Here the Wilde brothers played with the older George Moore.
After leaving Portora, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874, sharing rooms with his older brother Willie Wilde for two years. He was an outstanding student, and won the Berkeley Gold Medal, the highest award available to classics students at Trinity. He was awarded a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he continued his studies from 1874 to 1878 and where he became a part of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets being to make an art of life.
Wilde had a less than happy relationship with the prestigious Oxford Union. On matriculating in the autumn of 1874, Wilde applied to join the Union, but failed to be elected, a fact which came to light only recently. When the Union's librarian requested a presentation copy of Poems (1881), Wilde complied. After a debate called by Oliver Elton, the gift was condemned for supposed plagiarism and returned.
While at Magdalen, he won the 1878 Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna, which he read out at Encaenia; he failed, though, to win the Chancellor's English Essay Prize for an essay that would be published posthumously as The Rise of Historical Criticism (1909). In November 1878, he graduated with a double first in classical moderations and Literae Humaniores, or 'Greats'.
Poetry
- Ravenna (1878)
- Poems (1881)
- The Sphinx (1894)
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Plays
- Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880)
- The Duchess of Padua (1883)
- Salome (French version) (1893, first performed in Paris 1896)
- Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
- A Woman of No Importance (1893)
- Salome: A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)
- An Ideal Husband (1895) (text)
- The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) (text)
- La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy Fragmentary. First published 1908 in Methuen's Collected Works
Prose
- The Canterville Ghost (1887)
- The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888, fairy tales)
- The Decay Of Lying (First published in 1889, republished in Intentions 1891)
- Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891)
- Intentions (1891, critical dialogues and essays, comprising The Critic as Artist, The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison and The Truth of Masks)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891, Wilde's only novel)
- A House of Pomegranates (1891, fairy tales)
- The Soul of Man under Socialism (First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1891, first book publication 1904)
- Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (First published in the Oxford student magazine The Chameleon, December, 1894)
- De Profundis (1905)
- The Rise of Historical Criticism (published in incomplete form 1905 and completed form in 1908)
- The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1960) Re-released in 2000, with letters uncovered since 1960, and new, detailed, footnotes by Merlin Holland.
- Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal (Paris, 1893) has been attributed to Wilde, but was more likely a combined effort by a several of Wilde's friends, which he may have edited.
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