Oscar Wilde Biography
Great Quotes by Oscar Wilde
"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
“...imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.”
" I never approve or disapprove of anything now, it is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say and I never interfere with what charming people do"
Here is the complete, scandalous story of Victorian England's most colorful character.
A&E's Oscar Wilde Biography Video
Oscar Wilde Biography
poet, playwright, novelist, critic
"...I have put my genius into my life; all I've put into my works is my talent"
Oscar Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, to Sir William Wilde and Jane Francisca Elgee in Dublin, Ireland. Sir William was an eye and ear doctor and Jane wrote poems of revolution in an Irish newspaper under the pen name Speranza.
She exposed Oscar to the brilliant literary talk of the day and influenced and encouraged his talents greatly. He excelled at school, especially in his classical studies at Trinity College in Dublin, wrote poetry and developed his bohemian look into a unique lifestyle.
In 1874, he won a scholarship to Magdalen College in Oxford. Here he developed his interest in aestheticism, which is a belief that art should be for art's own sake, for the sheer beauty and sensuality of it...which was a departure from the Victorian view that art should represent virtues and communicate meaningful messages to the viewer.
Writers Walter Patin and John Ruskin were huge influences for Oscar and as an aesthete he wore long hair and velvet knee breeches...he expressed his love of beauty by filling his rooms of residence with sunflowers, peacock feathers and blue and white china. His attitude and eccentricity was ridiculed and satirized by his peers, such as Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience ( 1881 ), yet many admirers enjoyed his wit, brilliant mind and flair.
In 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem Ravenna and his first book was Poems ( 1881 ) which was received with mixed reviews, but did a good job of furthering his writing career. In 1881, Wilde went on a one-year lecture tour in the United States, where he was reviled and ridiculed by the male-dominated press...but the American women adored him.
In between lectures he made time to meet with Walt Whitman, Henry Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes.Wilde returned to London, moved briefly to Paris—where he attempted unsuccessfully to produce his second play, The Duchess of Padua—then returned to London and began a lecture tour in England.
In 1884 Oscar married Constance Lloyd and they had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan...in order to support his family Oscar went to work for the magazine Woman's World, doing editing from 1887-9. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales written for his sons. In 1891, Wilde published a total of four novels: A House of Pomegranates, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, Intentions, and The Picture of Dorian Gray—the latter netting him his greatest fame to date.
In the next four years, he strengthened his reputation as a playwright, with hugely successful productions of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest (both in 1895). The latter play, a comedy of manners, is commonly considered Wilde’s masterpiece, and is still widely performed to this day, although not always in its full 4 act original version.
Salome was also written during this time, but due to an old-fashioned English law stating that biblical characters could not be portrayed onstage, production of the play was refused in London. This incident led Wilde to publicly declare his intent to renounce his British citizenship to become a French citizen, although he never did get around to actually following through on that promise.
Oscar did involve himself sexually with other men even while still married, especially one man, Lord Alfred Douglas who was to bring about his great downfall. "Bosie", as Alfred was nicknamed was Oscar's obsession and he followed Bosie into a promiscuous world of homosexuality, abandoning his wife and children and courting disaster with Victorian society as his literary career flourished.
When Bosie's father the Marquess of Queensberry, confronted Oscar Wilde calling on him with a note addressed "To Oscar Wilde posing as a sodomite [sic]", Bosie talked Oscar into suing his father for slander. This plan backfired, however, as the Marquess counter-sued and homosexuality being illegal in England at the time, Oscar went to jail for two years hard labor.
He was totally disgraced and broken by this nightmarish experience of which he wrote about in De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol when he was finally permitted to write again. The experience of prison drastically affected Wilde’s perspective, lending a profundity to his writing that his previous dramatic and critical works had lacked.
Once released from prison, Wilde lived in Dieppe, France and then Paris under the alias of Sebastian Melmoth....he was never able to recapture his earlier witty brilliance and easy creative flow. Wilde died bankrupt on November 30, 1900, and was buried in the Bagneux Cemetery. His body was reinterred in 1909, in the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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