Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Oscar Wilde
-
Standard Name: Wilde, Oscar
Birth Name: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
OW
's significance as poet, playwright, and writer of prose fiction, remained in eclipse for many years after his notorious trial and imprisonment in Reading Gaol
, events whose chilling impact on poetry and prose in England was not reversed until the modernists returned to the struggle for unfettered aesthetic expression. A leading proponent of art for art's sake in England, OW
was a follower of Walter Pater
, from whose work he borrows in lavish quantity, and, like Pater, he was much influenced by the French l'art pour l'art poets, notably Charles Baudelaire
and Théophile Gautier
.
Clements, Patricia. Baudelaire and the English Tradition. Princeton University Press, 1985.
140-83
More recently, his brilliant aesthetic essays have drawn serious attention as the basis for many critical propositions . . . which we like to attribute to more ponderous names.
Ellmann, Richard, editor. The Critic as Artist: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Random House, 1969.
x
His notoriety as a casualty of oppressive laws against the practice of homosexuality is also the subject of a good deal of recent critical comment.
"Oscar Wilde" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Oscar_Wilde_%281854-1900%29_1889%2C_May_23._Picture_by_W._and_D._Downey.jpg.
Oscar Wilde
, virtually homeless in the limbo following his first trial, went to stay with AL
and her husband
; his wife
visited him at their house.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Viking, 1987.
440-1
Friends, Associates
Ethel Lilian Voynich
Stepniak and his work, including Underground Russia, 1883, were influential in ELV
's personal life and career.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Gray, Anne, and Pam Blevins. The World of Women in Classical Music. WordWorld Publications, 2007, pp. 876-7.
876
He taught her Russian, pushed her to continue writing, and was the first to introduce her...
Friends, Associates
Marie Belloc Lowndes
As a child she had already met several distinguished writers in England, and Mary Clarke Mohl
and Turgenev
in France.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Macmillan, 1941.
369-70
As a young adult she quickly became known to many eminent members of the...
Friends, Associates
Evelyn Sharp
ES
wrote later that at no time in her life did she make intimate friends easily. Most people she had to do with she liked up to a certain point only, but she could count...
In England she also formed close friendships and intellectual bonds with feminist and socialist intellectual Eleanor Marx
, barrister and mathematics professor Karl Pearson
, and socialist pioneer Edward Carpenter
. Others she met in...
Friends, Associates
Natalie Clifford Barney
At the age of six, NCB
had a chance encounter with Oscar Wilde
at an American seaside resort. He helped her escape from some children who were chasing her, and then sat her on his...
Friends, Associates
John Strange Winter
JSW
had an extensive social circle in London—her biographer, Oliver Bainbridge
, notes that a number of social claims were made upon her by reason of her popularity, and that these were always in advance...
Friends, Associates
Frances Sarah Hoey
FSH
was also a close friend of her fellow-Catholic Edmund Downey
. Her husband was a friend of Richard Holt Hutton
, joint editor of The Spectator. She recalled, at the time of his...
Friends, Associates
Rhoda Broughton
RB
's vitality, sincerity, and pungent wit gained her the friendship of some of the most notable people of her day.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2024, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Her wide circle of friends and acquaintances included Henry James
(the two became extremely...
