The fall of the house of Wilde : Oscar Wilde and his family

The first biography of Oscar Wilde that places him within the context of his family and social and historical milieu--a compelling volume that finally tells the whole story.

It's widely known that Oscar Wilde was precociously intellectual, flamboyant, and hedonistic--but lesser so that he owed these characteristics to his parents.

Oscar's mother, Lady Jane Wilde, rose to prominence as a political journalist, advocating a rebellion against colonialism in 1848. Proud, involved, and challenging, she opened a salon and was known as the most scintillating hostess of her day. She passed on her infectious delight in the art of living to Oscar, who drank it in greedily.

His father, Sir William Wilde, was acutely conscious of injustices of the social order. He laid the foundations for the Celtic cultural renaissance in the belief that culture would establish a common ground between the privileged and the poor, Protestant and Catholic. But Sir William was also a philanderer, and when he stood accused of sexually assaulting a young female patient, the scandal and trial sent shockwaves through Dublin society.

After his death, the Wildes decamped to London where Oscar burst irrepressibly upon the scene. The one role that didn't suit him was that of Victorian husband, as his wife, Constance, was to discover. For beneath his swelling head was a self-destructive itch: a lifelong devourer of attention, Oscar was unable to recognize when the party was over. Ultimately, his trial for indecency heralded the death of decadence--and his own.

In a major repositioning of our first modern celebrity, The Fall of the House of Wilde identifies Oscar Wilde as a member of one of the most dazzling Irish American families of Victorian times, and places him in the broader social, political, and religious context. It is a fresh and perceptive account of one of the most prominent characters of the late nineteenth century.

Author Notes

Emer O'Sullivan graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and has a master's degree in life writing and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of East Anglia, where she also lectured. This is her first book. She lives in London.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

O'Sullivan describes this debut as "an attempt to put Oscar [Wilde] in the context of his family and the family in the larger context of the history of Ireland." Her "attempt" is a success worthy of celebration. She follows Wilde from his earliest writing efforts to his star-making lecture tour through the U.S. and Canada, then on to the triumphs of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. She also explores how Wilde's family influenced his life and works. Included are his father, a surgeon who championed Irish culture; his mother, a "fiercely independent" poet and intellectual who died a pauper; and his older brother, a lawyer turned journalist who was destroyed by alcoholism. Then there were Wilde's lovers, including Lord Alfred Douglas, and Wilde's wife, Constance Lloyd, an acclaimed beauty whom O'Sullivan describes as loving, forgiving, and naive. Central to the portrait are two court cases. In one, Wilde's father was cleared of having raped a former patient but nevertheless had his reputation destroyed. In the other, Wilde himself was found guilty of "indecent acts" and served two years in prison. O'Sullivan's impressively comprehensive biography is equal parts political history, literary criticism, and Shakespearean tragedy. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Another Oscar Wilde biography may seem supererogatory, but it isn't. Indeed, anyone interested in Wilde should find it fully as fascinating as any of its predecessors. O'Sullivan imbeds Oscar's life in the context of those of his father, William (1815-76); mother, Jane (1821-96); and brother, William (1852-99). Physician, archaeologist, antiquarian, and folklorist, father William contributed valuably to ophthalmology and toweringly to the recovery of Ireland's past. Translator, poet, and mythographer, Jane passionately hymned the Young Ireland movement of 1848 under the nom de plume Speranza, and later, as, simply, Lady Wilde, blazed the trail for the philosophical and comparative study of myth and religion. Brother William was a brilliant society journalist but, alcoholic and depressive, more self-destructive than Oscar. They and their luminary associates are at least as enthralling as Oscar and his entourage, and the witty public candor and individual assertiveness each of them insisted upon got them into the troubles that drained their resources and, for the men, shortened their lives. O'Sullivan saliently notes that erotic obsessions that became scandals aired in court destroyed both father William's and Oscar's careers, and she ferrets out of Oscar's writings the epistemological relativism rife in early modernist art and the culturally subversive tactics of later postmodernism. A book to be wild about.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2016 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Oscar Wilde put his true art into being Oscar Wilde. He spoke in faultless sentences and, with his brilliance of dress and force of presence, drew beauty out of transient moments. His writing then recounted this perfection of daily being, this ability to be steeped in the immediacy of place and time. The aesthetic philosophy he lived was developed in part by his mentor, Walter Pater, an Oxford professor; Wil de gave flesh to Pater's ideas, especially the notion that success is "to burn always with this hard gemlike flame." _ Yet an even greater influence was Wilde's mother, with her gift Oscar for loading each instant with poetic passion. While Wilde's imprisonment for "acts of gross indecency with male persons" was a tragedy, he may have avoided the misfortune outlined in one of his many bons mots: "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." In her deeply researched biography of the Wilde family, Emer O'Sullivan reminds us of the influence of Jane Wilde, a bluestocking who sometimes called herself Speranza and invented for herself a romantic Italian family tree. A wildly erudite member of the Young Ireland movement, Jane made her name as a poet, intellectual and supporter of women's rights. Her salons gathered together the key thinkers of the day - W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Browning and Eleanor Marx (Karl's socialist daughter). Jane walks right off the page in "The Fall of the House of Wilde," and I wished for more of her, especially when it came to her many publications and how they colored Oscar's writing. "Listening to their mother's reading and embellishing the lyrics," O'Sullivan writes of Jane reciting Whitman to her sons, "would have created in the boys a visceral bond between the maternal and the word, a place of storied memories of desire, loss and sensual pleasure." Instead, and in sometimes plodding prose, O'Sullivan gives equal time to Wilde's philandering father, a doctor with an interest in Celtic antiquities. For history to have lost sight of Wilde's father seems like merely carelessness, but to have lost Lady Wilde is a great misfortune. O'Sullivan's book is strongest when she positions the Wildes within the larger framework of Irish history; many Wilde biographers glide over not only his mother but also his IrishI I Yet O'Sullivan's narrative lacks the vitality of Richard Ellmann's elegant biography, whose intricate analysis draws revealing connections and goes deep. Could Wilde's relationship with his bold mother, who risked imprisonment and death by speaking out against the injustices perpetrated on the Irish by the British, have anything to do with his own risky behavior in relation to his sexuality? More pointedly, Oscar Wilde wrote of his wife's pregnancy as "loathsome," evidence of "disgusting" nature, a defilement of beauty with "the vile cicatrices of maternity," concluding that "it befouls the altar of the soul." With this blatant misogyny, most obvious in his treatment of the woman Jane Wilde had pushed him to marry, might Oscar be rebelling against the mother (and the maternal) he wished to resemble? O'Sullivan calls back to flickering life an intriguing figure in feminist history. Virginia Woolf wrote of the great unpublished works of women - those meals, salons and gardens that have their short time in the sun and then are gone. Wilde's radiant art of living, hard to translate into the fixity of published words, was mostly lost after his early death. His mother, whose great work was her embrace of the splendor and awful brevity of each moment, disappeared more completely. DEBORAH LUTZ'S most recent book is "The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects."

Library Journal Review

In her first book, O'Sullivan sets out to place Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) within the context of a family where keen intellects, witty conversation, and literary talent were traits individually expressed but common to all. The book is at its best when covering the professional and social lives of Sir William Wilde and Lady Jane Wilde, Oscar's parents. While there is ample evidence that these eminent Irish Victorians deserve further study, they are not fleshed out here beyond the singular imposed dimension of impending ruin. The author oddly characterizes the biographical narrative of this family as an inversion of the American Dream-from riches to rags. The rise and fall of a family's fortunes is not an uncommon tale, especially after the death of its patriarch. For all of their collective brilliance and peculiarities this aspect of the Wildean story is mundane; it's what makes them common, not particular. VERDICT The author's analysis is thin and rarely achieves more than supposition or insinuation. Readers interested in Wilde and his family are better served approaching this text after reading Richard Ellmann's seminal Oscar Wilde.-Todd Simpson, York Coll., CUNY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Preface	p. ix
1 Roots	p. 1
2 Lust for Knowledge	p. 11
3 Patron-cum-Scholar	p. 25
4 Rising High	p. 34
5 The Bourgeois Rebel	p. 43
6 Flirtations, Father Figures and Femmes Fatales	p. 57
7 Marriage	p. 63
8 Merrion Square	p. 75
9 The Wildean Missionary Zeal	p. 84
10 Wider Horizons	p. 92
11 Open House	p. 100
12 1864: The End of Bliss	p. 108
13 Honour and Ignominy	p. 116
14 Love, Hatred and Revenge: The 'Great Libel Case'	p. 123
15 Times are Changing	p. 135
16 More Highs, More Blows	p. 146
17 Transience and Poetry	p. 154
18 The Unravelling	p. 164
19 Dabbling with Options and Ideas	p. 176
20 Openings and Closings	p. 185
21 Literary Bohemia	p. 196
22 Divergent Paths	p. 210
23 Looking to America	p. 220
24 'Mr Oscar Wilde is "not such a fool as he looks"'	p. 228
25 Marriage: A Gold Band Sliced in Half	p. 234
26 'The Crushes'	p. 252
27 Aesthetic Living	p. 259
28 Momentous Changes	p. 272
29 Colonial Resistance	p. 282
30 The Picture of Dorian Gray: A 'tale with a moral'	p. 298
31 'It is personalities, not principles that move the age'	p. 304
32 High Life, Low Life and Little Literary Life	p. 313
33 Salome: The Breaking of Taboos	p. 324
34 'Truly you are a starling'	p. 334
35 Fatal Affairs	p. 345
36 An Un-Ideal Husband	p. 359
37 Letting Rip	p. 366
38 'It is said that Passion makes one think in a circle'	p. 373
39 Facing Fate	p. 389
40 Impotent Silence	p. 402
41 The 'Disgraced' Name	p. 409
42 Author of a Legend	p. 416
43 'We all come out of prison as sensitive as children'	p. 420
44 'I have fiddled too often on the string of Doom'	p. 427
45 'I am really in the gutter'	p. 431
Epilogue	p. 443
Notes	p. 445
Bibliography	p. 471
Acknowledgements	p. 477
Index	p. 479

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