Oscar Wilde

Biography

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was born in Dublin to literary parents — his mother a poet and Irish nationalist, his father a prominent surgeon. He won a scholarship to Oxford, where he absorbed the Aesthetic movement's doctrine that art exists for its own sake, not for moral instruction. By the 1880s he was the most celebrated wit in London: celebrity lectures, epigrams reported in newspapers, dress as performance, persona as art. His plays made him rich and famous. The Importance of Being Earnest opened in February 1895 to enormous success. Three months later, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry (father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas) for libel after Queensberry left a calling card describing Wilde as a 'posing somdomite' [sic]. Wilde lost the case, which exposed his homosexuality. He was tried for 'gross indecency,' convicted, and sentenced to two years' hard labour. He was released in 1897, broken in health, financially ruined, and socially destroyed. He died in Paris in 1900 at forty-six. The play that made him was written at the height of his fame; the trial that destroyed him came while it was still running.

Oscar Wilde at a glance