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WORK TITLE: The Fall of the House of Wilde
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.emerosullivan.co.uk/
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Irish
(Not the professor in Germany.) * http://www.rte.ie/entertainment/book-reviews/2016/0907/814920-emer-osullivan-the-fall-of-the-house-of-wilde/ * http://www.emerosullivan.co.uk/author/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL EDUCATION:
Trinity College, Dublin, M.A.; University of East Anglia, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Biographer
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
On her home page, Emer O’Sullivan’s describes her book, The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family, as an attempt “to put Oscar in the context of his family and the family in the context of the history of Ireland.” Wilde became famous—or, according to some, infamous—in the late nineteenth century for his scintillating plays and fiction. In the 1890s, however, he was arrested and accused of “gross indecency” (a euphemism for homosexual behavior), and sent to jail. Although Wilde’s life and career are well known, his relationship with his family is less familiar. “O’Sullivan,” said Booklist reviewer Ray Olson, “saliently notes that erotic obsessions that became scandals aired in court destroyed both father William’s and Oscar’s careers.”
Wilde came from a well-known and respectable Victorian family. They were, wrote Todd Simpson in Library Journal, “a family where keen intellects, witty conversation, and literary talent were traits individually expressed but common to all.” “The Wildes prized independent thinking,” noted a reviewer in the Economist. “Sir William … controversially advocated interracial coupling, arguing that it encouraged diversity of thought and the progression of society.” “William was a Victorian polymath, spewing out learned books,” wrote Suzi Feay in the Financial Times. “A renowned expert in aural medicine, he was appointed Queen Victoria’s doctor in Ireland (not much work involved there, since she never visited the country). As passionate a patriot as his wife, he devoted his spare time to compiling Irish folklore and helped inaugurate the Celtic Revival, the movement that sought to reclaim the dignity of Irish history.” Oscar’s 1895 trial for indecency, related a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “echoed that of his father, who also incited a scandal when a lover sued him for libel; her `protracted smear campaign’ provided delicious gossip for Dublin society.”
Lady Jane Wilde was the intellectual equal of her husband. “Jane wrote poems raging with republican spirit, felt passionately about the `bondage of women’ and translated a deeply unpopular work on temptation,” explained the Economist reviewer, and “Oscar inherited this sense of intellectual daring.” Spectator contributor Tim Bouverie also commented on the influence of Oscar’s free-thinking mother: “Jane Wilde was a whole bundle of paradoxes: a rebel who was entirely at ease within the bosom of the establishment (the Wildes employed six servants to manage their fashionable Dublin residence), a protofeminist who nevertheless succumbed to the Victorian expectations of marriage and motherhood, and a member of the Protestant Ascendancy who inspired hopes of Irish independence.” “She provided her son with constant support,” said Alex Dean in the Prospect. “This might go some way to explaining his resilience in the face of later public mockery.”
Another member of the family, Oscar’s older brother William, was just as talented as his sibling, becoming a noted journalist before succumbing to alcoholism. “Willie Wilde … is, today, the least well-known member of the family,” wote Eibhear Walshe in the Irish Times, “and O’Sullivan deals with the difficult and unhappy Willie with clear-eyed understanding. Starting off with as much promise as Oscar and always supported by his admiring mother, Willie Wilde soon ran into difficulty. His first marriage, to the wealthy American newspaper owner Mrs Frank Leslie, failed because of his drinking and his infidelities…. Willie’s final days, his decline, his disloyalty to his brother, his financial dependence on his mother, all make for sorry reading.”
O’Sullivan also devotes herself to placing the Wildes in the cultural milieu from which they arose. “Before Oscar’s descent into the decadence which he allowed betray him, the most notable achievement of this book emerges,” noted Mary Leland in the Irish Examiner. “Already thoroughly researched and rich with scholarship, it is from here that O’Sullivan’s narrative opens onto a glittering, fractious endless argument. The subject is art and artists, the world of literary and dramatic criticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, poetry, Ruskin, Whistler and the aesthetic influences and pretensions of a world in which Oscar not only flowered but eclipsed most of his contemporaries.”
Although Sir William died in 1876, his wife and his elder son survived to witness Oscar’s public trial and disgrace. “Lady Jane Wilde, powerless to control the accidents, illnesses, social impairments and other damage done to her family through alcohol and public sex scandals, scrimped a pittance in London as an occasional author and translator,” related Ian Thomson in a review in the Londong Guardian. “Her request to visit Oscar in jail was denied by the authorities. When she died of bronchitis in 1896, Willie could not even afford to pay for her headstone. In almost every particular, writes O’Sullivan, the Wildes `inverted the American dream–they went from riches to rags.’”
Many reviewers gave O’Sullivan’s biography of the Wilde family high marks. A Publishers Weekly reviewer summed up The Fall of the House of Wilde as an “impressively comprehensive biography [that] is equal parts political history, literary criticism, and Shakespearean tragedy.” In the New York Journal of Books, Vinton Rafe McCabe commented: “Emer O’Sullivan, throughout the entirety of the text, creates sentences of such complex opaline beauty that her book might just as rightly be categorized poetry as biography. And let’s agree that this work is an achievement in another way: It is very likely the finest of all the many biographies of Wilde. Indeed, it is among the best, if not the very best itself, of all the literary biographies brought into print in the last few years.” “In The Fall of the House of Wilde,” concluded Paddy Kehoe in a review at the Irish media site RTE, “Emer O’Sullivan has worked for the reader a spreading family tree, executed with elegance and admirable perception.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2016, Ray Olson, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family, p. 30.
Economist, June 11, 2016, “Born to Be Wilde; Literary History,” p. 83.
Financial Times, June 17, 2016, Suzi Feay, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
Guardian, June 5, 2016, Ian Thomson, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
Irish Examiner, August 27, 2016, Mary Leland, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
Irish Times, June 25, 2016, Eibhear Walshe, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2016, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
Library Journal, October 15, 2016, Todd Simpson, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde, p. 84.
Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2016, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde, p. 42.
Spectator, June 11, 2016, Tim Bouverie, “Far from Ideal,” p. 36.
ONLINE
Emer O’Sullivan Home Page, http://www.emerosullivan.co.uk (March 5, 2017), author profile.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (March 5, 2017), Vinton Rafe McCabe, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
Prospect, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ (May 19, 2016), Alex Dean, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
RTE, http://www.rte.ie/ (January 6, 2017), Paddy Kehoe, review of The Fall of the House of Wilde.
About Emer O’Sullivan
Emer O'Sullivan
As a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, with an MA in Life Writing and a PhD in literature at UEA, I am delighted to introduce The Fall of the House of Wilde, my first book.
I came to write The Fall of the House of Wilde after reading a portrayal of eminent Irish Victorians, one of which was Sir William Wilde.
This picture of mid-century Ireland was new to me – more Bloomsbury London, a place of high spirits and high erudition, than the Victorian Ireland of famine and faction typically depicted. The Wildes were at the centre of this society, contrary to previous depictions.
In many biographies of Oscar Wilde, his parents William and Jane are not given their due. Yet each of his parents is central to an understanding of his life. Jane Wilde’s salon at Merrion Square in Dublin was a city institution, drawing as many as a hundred guests on an afternoon, from all classes.
Their reputation and importance was a source of great pride to Oscar; it shaped his personal identity, and gave him the authority, confidence and appetite to rise quickly to international fame.
So this book is an attempt to put Oscar in the context of his family and the family in the context of the history of Ireland.
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Print Marked Items
O'Sullivan, Emer. The Fall of the House of
Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family
Todd Simpson
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p84.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
O'Sullivan, Enter. The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family. Bloomsbury Pr. Oct. 2016. 512p.
photos, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781608199877. $35; ebk. ISBN 9781608199884. LIT
In her first book, O'Sullivan sets out to place Oscar Wilde (18541900) 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 Dreamfrom 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
Simpson, Todd
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Simpson, Todd. "O'Sullivan, Emer. The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family." Library Journal, 15
Oct. 2016, p. 84+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and
His Family
Ray Olson
Booklist.
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family. By Emer O'Sullivan. Oct. 2016. 512p. illus.
Bloomsbury, $35 (9781608199877): ebook, $24.99 (9781608199884). 828.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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 (181576); mother, Jane (182196); and brother, William (185299). 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 selfdestructive 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.Ray Olson
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 30. General
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Born to be Wilde; Literary history
The Economist.
419.8993 (June 11, 2016): p83(US).
COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Fine and dandy
Oscar Wilde came from a wild and eccentric family
The Fall of the House of Wilde. By Emer OSullivan. Bloomsbury; 495 pages. To be published in America in October.
AS A child, Oscar Wilde announced that he would like to be remembered as the hero of a "cause celebre and to go
down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as 'Regina Versus Wilde'". He succeeded, of course, and his notoriety
poses a problem for biographers unlikely to discover anything new about the great aesthete. They increasingly turn to
the lessercanonised figures in his sphere; in 2011 came Franny Moyle's account of Wilde's wife, Constance Lloyd.
Then "Wilde's Women" by Eleanor Fitzsimons. Now Emer O'Sullivan, the author of a new book "The Fall of the House
of Wilde", places Oscar in the context of his immediate family, stating that "it is to No.1 Merrion Square we need to
look for the formation of Oscar's mind."
This approach can reap rewards. Some familial ties are plain to see; Oscar's renowned style and turn of phrase finds its
origins in his mother, Jane; she deplores those who "paraphrase a Poet into the prose of everyday life" and rebukes the
subtitle of "Lady Windermere's Fan" on the grounds that "no one cares for a good woman." Jane's salons attracted
intellectual figures, with attendants seeking to display their wit and conversational skill. Oscar emulated these events
notably in his drawingroom dramas, where style was paramountbut also in his salons, named "Tea and Beauties", in
London.
The Wildes prized independent thinking. Sir William, a renowned polymath and doctor, controversially advocated
interracial coupling, arguing that it encouraged diversity of thought and the progression of society. His wife Jane wrote
poems raging with republican spirit, felt passionately about the "bondage of women" and translated a deeply unpopular
work on temptation. Oscar inherited this sense of intellectual daring and the need to push boundaries. In one of his first
pieces of professional writing, he praises the patent homoeroticism of paintings by Spencer Stanhope. Other reviewers,
likely fearful of social condemnation, turned a blind eye.
Yet Ms O'Sullivan often strains to make parallels that aren't there. Much is made, for example, of Oscar's affair with
Robbie Ross, two years into his marriage with Lloyd. This is the exact time, Ms O'Sullivan notes, at which a patient of
William's called Mary Travers aroused suspicion from Jane. According to Ms O'Sullivan, this may be an echo of the
memory or significant "of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships". That father and son shared a
wandering eye does not warrant such sweeping statements.
At the same time, obvious parallels are ignored or suffer from a lack of information. Jane's lifelong interest in women's
rights and the undervalued intellects of wives surely influenced Oscar's decision to edit Woman's World, a magazine
which provided more varied reading material for an emerging class of educated women. How his family responded to
Oscar's trial and imprisonmentthe climax of any biography of the writerreaders can only guess: "what Jane or Willie
[Oscar's brother] thought about Oscar's pending trial is nowhere recorded." Similarly, the impact of the trial upon
Oscar's childrenwho dropped the surname "Wilde" as a result of the scandalis barely mentioned.
Readers may finish the book longing for more detail on Jane Wilde, who is repeatedly lauded as a literary force in her
own right (though with little textual support). It is her fate that is the most disquieting. Oscar achieved his aim to be
remembered by historyhis grave in Paris is a site of pilgrimage. Jane, however, paid the price of his fame. Once voted
the greatest living Irishwoman by her contemporaries, Jane Wilde was buried in poverty "without fanfarewithout name
or record…;in soil to which she did not belong".
The Fall of the House of Wilde.
By Emer O'Sullivan.
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Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Born to be Wilde; Literary history." The Economist, 11 June 2016, p. 83(US). General OneFile,
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Far from ideal
Tim Bouverie
Spectator.
331.9798 (June 11, 2016): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family
by Emer O'Sullivan
Bloomsbury, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 512, ISBN 9781408830116
There were few subjects which escaped Oscar Wilde's barbed wit: dentists, cynics, Americans, literary critics,
democracy, the working classes, the middle classes, the upper classes and Bernard Shaw were all prey for his cutting
paradoxes. Family, however, got off lightly. Not for Wilde the sinister or cruel depictions of relations which permeate
the novels of Evelyn Waugh and find their dysfunctional climax in Brideshead . On the contrary, family is an
affectionate theme running through most of Wilde's work and is at the very heart of his masterpiece, The Importance of
Being Earnest a play whose plot rests on the fact that the leading protagonist has lost his parents.
This does not mean that Wilde was always dutiful towards his family. As a gay man, who had a number of serious
affairs with other men, he was far from being an ideal husband and, as Emer O'Sullivan recounts, would often abandon
his wife for months on end. Distracted by fame, he would also neglect his literary mother, who, despite having moved to
London with her sons after the death of her husband, led an increasingly lonely lifethough Oscar would always pay
her debts. Yet he was deeply attached to his family, whom he loved with all the unrestrained passion for which he was
famous.
For a man who would later become so notorious, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde had a notably respectable
upbringing. Neither born nor left in a handbagwhich as Lady Bracknell reminds us, 'displays a contempt for the
ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution' Wilde was the son
of two of Ireland's most famous public figures. Sir William Wilde was one of the great Victorian polymaths. A surgeon
by training, he wrote pioneering works on diseases of the ear and On the Physical, Moral and Social Condition of the
Deaf and Dumb . In addition, he was a scientist, natural historian, travel writer, archaeologist, ethnologist and
cataloguer of Celtic artefacts. Overshadowed both by his son and later Irish giants such as W. B. Yeats and Douglas
Hyde, Sir William has been neglected by historians. Yet, reading O'Sullivan's elegantly articulated narrative, there can
be no doubt that William Wilde was one of the initiators of 'a new vision, rightly called the Celtic Revival'.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The tragedy of women, Wilde claimed in Earnest, was that they became 'like their mothers', whilst the tragedy of men
was that they didn't. Whether Wilde would have wanted to have become entirely like his mother is doubtful. Though
Jane Wilde, née Elgee, shared and largely imparted her son's passion for literature, she was also an adherent of Carlyle's
philosophy that life was a serious business. 'Be earnest, earnest, earnest,' she wrote, some 40 years before her son would
satirise the Victorian shibboleth. Earnest did not equal dull, however, and Jane came to prominence during the uprising
of 1848 as the unlikely (she was a Protestant) champion of Irish Catholic nationalism. Indeed, as O'Sullivan points out,
Jane Wilde was a whole bundle of paradoxes: a rebel who was entirely at ease within the bosom of the establishment
(the Wildes employed six servants to manage their fashionable Dublin residence), a protofeminist who nevertheless
succumbed to the Victorian expectations of marriage and motherhood, and a member of the Protestant Ascendancy who
inspired hopes of Irish independence.
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The Fall of the House of Wilde, as the title suggests, is, of course, far more than just an account of Oscar's parents
though it earns its distinctive place in Wildean literature primarily for reestablishing Sir William and Jane Wilde in
their own right. Two thirds of the book is dedicated to Oscar; his poetry, plays, poses, lovers and, finally, trial. At all
stages, O'Sullivan is scrupulous and scholarly, and does an excellent job of placing her subject in his artistic and literary
context. The chapters on the Aesthetic Movement are particularly good. She also fulfils the Aeschylean implications of
her title: her rediscovery of Oscar's parents, making their son's fall all the more potent.
Wilde was a genius who paid an intolerable price for living in a bigoted age. And yet, like all tragic heroes, he was
himself partly to blame for his demise. Having expressed his desire either to be 'famous' or 'notorious', he was both, and
this most famous writer of comedies ended by authoring his own tragedy.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bouverie, Tim. "Far from ideal." Spectator, 11 June 2016, p. 36+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454704046&it=r&asid=7ea2bc855c203225d45b481c5522c0c0.
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The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and
His Family
Publishers Weekly.
263.20 (May 16, 2016): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family
Emer O'Sullivan. Bloomsbury Press, $35 (512p) ISBN 9781608199877
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 starmaking 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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family." Publishers Weekly, 16 May 2016, p. 42. General
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Emer O'Sullivan - The Fall of the House of Wilde
Updated / Friday, 6 Jan 2017 17:06 0
Emer O'Sullivan's compelling story of an iconic Irish dynasty.
Emer O'Sullivan's compelling story of an iconic Irish dynasty.
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Publisher Bloomsbury, hardback
This 444-page work from Emer O'Sullivan is the second significant labour of scholarship to appear in less than a year about Oscar Wilde’s family and milieu, following Eleanor Fitzsimons Wilde’s Women which appeared last October. The latter work book recalled the writer's sister Isola, who died young, his wife Constance and his mother, the nationalist and feminist advocate, Lady Jane ‘Speranza’ Wilde (1821-1896.).
A formidable influence, Lady Jane also looms large in this fascinating, recently-published book. However, the son’s prodigious talents were clearly the legacy of both his committed, far-seeing parents, who were key figures in nineteenth century Irish public life.
Speranza was an advocate of the rebellion of 1848 and her poetry was frequently seditious. In her public pronouncements, she excoriated the British establishment for, as she saw it, fostering the circumstances which caused The Famine. In this regard she was an identifiable influence on Countess Markievicz and on other figures of the Irish Literary Revival. In 1882, on a speaking tour of the United States, Wilde found that his mother's polemics and poetry had much greater fame than his sparkling dramas.
Oscar’s father Sir William, an eye and ear specialist, cultivated a vision of Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, which would finally reconcile its disparate and antagonistic elements through recognition of the shared Celtic heritage. He wrote widely on Irish archaeology and folklore. Sir William, however, had certain frailities, and was accused of sexually assaulting a young female prisoner, which scandal captivated Dublin society.
Wilde senior wrote encouragingly to his son, while he was in America. Well dear old Oscar goodbye – you are working bravely and you are wise and you have not made devils for yourself as I have. Famously, the playwright presented himself to American customs officials with the immortal words: `I have nothing to declare but my genius.” 116 years after his death in November 1900 in Paris, the genius endures in countless stage productions around the globe.On October 16, author Colm Tóibín will read Oscar Wilde's De Profundis in its entirely at Reading Jail, where the celebrated writer once spent two horrendous years.
In The Fall of the House of Wilde, Emer O'Sullivan has worked for the reader a spreading family tree, executed with elegance and admirable perception.
Paddy Kehoe
The Fall of the House of Wilde review – Oscar’s family misfortunes
Emer O’Sullivan traces the journey of the literary giant’s family from riches to rags
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde died at 46, the same age as his dissolute brother Willie. Photograph: PA
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Ian Thomson
Sunday 5 June 2016 04.00 EDT
Oscar (Fingal O’Flahertie) Wilde, the self-adoring dandy of Victorian letters, toured America in 1882 with a trunkful of lace-trimmed velvet coats and low-cut Byronic blouses. “If I were alone on a desert island and had my things,” the 27-year-old Dublin-born aesthete declared, “I would dress for dinner every night.” From New York to Colorado, audiences went wild for Oscar, whose applications of rouge and dyed green carnation buttonholes were so unlike anything worn by cowboys. The 6ft 3in Irishman had yet to write the great works that made him famous (The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol). Yet by turning himself into a commodity he was able to be famous merely for being famous. Without Wilde’s very modern genius for self-promotion, conceivably, there would have been no David Bowie or, indeed, Kim Kardashian.
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Of course, the honeymoon did not last. In 1895, 13 years later, Wilde was tried in London for “gross indecency” (Victorian-era code for homosexuality) and afterwards jailed. At that time in Britain sodomy carried a sentence of servitude for life. Perhaps it is merely romantic to suggest that the stylised wigs, silver-buckled shoes, satin breeches and faux ermine stoles worn by bishops, peers of the realm and high court judges have a homoerotic component. A certain sort of Englishman has always liked to put on lipstick. Mick Jagger, the Danny La Rue of rock, looked fetching as a woman on the cover of the 1978 Stones album Some Girls, while boy X-Factor contestants, with their shaved eyebrows, diamond earrings and nails lovingly manicured, present an almost Gloria Swanson-like image of adornment. Wilde was only the first of hundreds of would-be stars who were later consumed by the monster of their own celebrity.
In her absorbing (if at times rather blandly written) history of the Wilde family and its attendant woes, The Fall of the House of Wilde, Emer O’Sullivan considers the writer’s father, mother and dissolute brother Willie, who are often skirted over in biographies of Oscar. Wilde’s flamboyant dress sense and craving for attention derived, in part, from his mother’s bohemian example. A salon butterfly in pink and silver, Lady Jane Wilde ran a “liberal, lively and unbuttoned” household in Dublin’s well-appointed, predominantly Protestant Merrion Square. She championed women’s rights and, most unusually for the Anglo Irish, the cause of Irish independence. Her husband, Sir William Wilde, was a distinguished ophthalmic surgeon and historian of Irish folklore. (An operative practice for mastoiditis is still known as “Wilde’s incision”.) His meticulous cataloguing of ancient Irish myth foreshadowed the Celtic revival three decades later under WB Yeats.
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Dreadfully, however, William was the only one of the family to die with “honours and dignity”, says O’Sullivan. His sons Willie and Oscar died as outcasts; Jane died a pauper. Willie, a London Daily Telegraph journalist, drank as though immune from the wall-eyed hangover of tomorrow. By the time he married a wealthy American widow, Mrs Frank Leslie, in 1891, liquor had got him well and truly licked. (The marriage was dissolved after a private eye reported evidence of adultery.) Willie’s wild drinking was fuelled by jealousy for his younger brother’s literary acclaim and, perhaps, by experiences of abandonment and loneliness following his father’s death back in Dublin in 1876. Like most alcoholics, Willie Wilde was a mess of self-pity, mendaciousness and gleeful irresponsibility. His shambolic, unwashed appearance prompted Oscar to make his famous quip: “He sponges on everyone but himself.” Having resorted to stealing and selling Oscar’s clothes for more booze, Willie died in London in 1899 at the age of 46. His daughter Dorothy Wilde, no less wretched, perished of a heroin overdose in France half a century later, having befriended the lesbian novelist Djuna Barnes, author of the neo-Jacobean fantasia Nightwood.
Lady Jane Wilde, powerless to control the accidents, illnesses, social impairments and other damage done to her family through alcohol and public sex scandals, scrimped a pittance in London as an occasional author and translator. Her request to visit Oscar in jail was denied by the authorities. When she died of bronchitis in 1896, Willie could not even afford to pay for her headstone. In almost every particular, writes O’Sullivan, the Wildes “inverted the American dream – they went from riches to rags”.
On his release from jail in 1897, Wilde absconded to the continent with his lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. In Naples they went to ground in the Villa Giudice (now the Villa Bracate). With its steps down to the sea, the Via Posillipo property was reposeful, but Wilde had a hard time fending off the press. (The Naples Echo had already announced the arrival of a certain Sebastian Melmoth. “Readers may know that this is the pseudonym of Oscar Wilde”.) A few days later, on 9 October 1897, a reporter inveigled his way into the villa. “Signor Wilde cast me a glacial, interrogative gaze. In one of his upper incisors a piece of gold scintillated strangely whenever he spoke. He was wearing a suit of incomparable fine white English linen, and a richly embroidered shirt with a vermilion cravat to match.” Such was the importance of not being sartorially earnest.
The Villa Giudice servants afterwards stole Wilde’s clothes and other belongings, including the first draft manuscript of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. By now Wilde had been disowned by his long-suffering wife Constance. He threatened to blow out his brains in a “Neapolitan urinal” but died in Paris; like Willie before him, he was only 46. The image-conscious aesthete had finally gone the way of all flesh.
The Fall of the House of Wilde is published by Bloomsbury (£25). Click here to order a copy for £20
The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O’Sullivan review
A valuable family history shows that Oscar Wilde was unmistakably his parents’ child
Oscar Wilde: son of the talented, lively and influential Jane and William Wilde
Oscar Wilde: son of the talented, lively and influential Jane and William Wilde
Eibhear Walshe
Sat, Jun 25, 2016, 02:22
First published:
Sat, Jun 25, 2016, 02:22
Book Title:
The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family
ISBN-13:
9781408843581
Author:
Emer O'Sullivan
Publisher:
Bloomsbury
Guideline Price:
£25.0
In 1896, two young brothers, just arrived from England, and with reinvented names, were settling into their German boarding school when they were summoned to play cricket. In the words of the younger boy, writing more than 50 years later: “My brother and I had fled from England with all of our summer and winter clothing, but until this time we had no occasion to wear our cricket flannels.”
As they prepared for the game, they were horrified to see their old names still written in name tapes on their flannels and a panic ensued to get rid of the evidence of their true, tainted identity. “I can see my brother now, in the comparative seclusion of the washing-place, frantically hacking away at the tapes with his pocket-knife.”
Those young brothers were Oscar Wilde’s sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, rechristened Holland in the wake of their father’s imprisonment in 1895. That frantic scramble to erase the name of Wilde was remembered in painful detail by Vyvyan Holland in his memoir Son of Oscar Wilde and is one of the most telling illustrations of the opprobrium that the name Wilde provoked at this time and for many years afterwards.
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Oscar Wilde’s name was problematic in Irish public discourse and the slow process by which his family name has been gradually appropriated and reclaimed in contemporary Ireland says much about our changing sense of what Irishness can be allowed to include. As laws changed and social perceptions altered, first Wilde’s sexuality, then his Irishness and finally the vital importance of his family identity has been acknowledged.
For example, last year in Castlerea, Co Roscommon, on the 200th anniversary of William Wilde’s birth, his achievements were proudly celebrated and local Wilde family graves restored. This new study of the Wilde family by Emer O’Sullivan, called The Fall of the House of Wilde, is a valuable addition to the scholarly reclamation of the Wilde name and, as Stephen Fry comments on the cover, “This is a book that reminds us how very unlikely it is that a genius will be born in a vacuum. Oscar was, O’Sullivan demonstrates, every inch his parents’ child.”
The focus of this book is Oscar within the context of a talented and lively family. William and Jane Wilde are key to that story, producing a son who, in his own words “awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me”.
It can be argued that they themselves were key in the awakening of the Celtic imagination at the end of the 19th century, with their innovative work as writers, scholars, folklorists and cultural historians. Emer O’Sullivan makes this link plain when she asserts that “the political and cultural campaign William and Jane fought was fought again years later, in 1916, with bloody results”.
The reputations of both Jane and William Wilde suffered with their son’s disgrace. He was himself keenly aware of the impressive nature of their achievements, writing in his prison testament De Profundis: “She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation”.
O’Sullivan provides a lucid account of their literary careers and the first half of the book concentrates on Jane and William’s backgrounds and their artistic and literary achievements.
Their unconventional and ultimately successful marriage and their scholarly work is presented in detail. Both are revealed as hardworking and innovative in their thinking and their writing. Their penchant for publicity, more particularly Jane’s relish for dispute, came firstly with the Nation trial of 1849 and then, more spectacularly, with the Mary Travers trial of 1864, at a point when William Wilde had reached the pinnacle of his success with a knighthood from Queen Victoria.
Jane’s intemperate letter of complaint to Dr Robert Travers about his daughter Mary’s behaviour led to a writ from Mary Travers, claiming damages of £2,000 as compensation for this libel against her honour. However, Jane Wilde refused to pay and, on December 12th, 1864, the case of Travers versus Wilde opened in Dublin, to the great delight of the newspaper-reading public.
Eventually, the jury found in Mary Travers’s favour, but only awarded her one farthing for her honour. Jane was the only winner in the Travers case, perceived as the wronged wife, vexed beyond endurance by the enraged, cast-off mistress. William’s reputation did suffer in the long term as a result of this case and it is clear that Jane’s success in the courtroom influenced Oscar in his later fatal decision to sue the Marquess of Queensberry in 1895 in London.
Willie Wilde, Oscar’s older brother, is, today, the least well-known member of the family and O’Sullivan deals with the difficult and unhappy Willie with clear-eyed understanding. Starting off with as much promise as Oscar and always supported by his admiring mother, Willie Wilde soon ran into difficulty.
His first marriage, to the wealthy American newspaper owner Mrs Frank Leslie, failed because of his drinking and his infidelities. “The marriage and America offered the last glimmer of hope that he might ever change, take initiative, shape his destiny, and all those other active verbs memoirists avoid when speaking of Willie. It is more accurate to say that Willie went out to American a drinker and returned a drunkard.”
Willie’s final days, his decline, his disloyalty to his brother, his financial dependence on his mother, all make for sorry reading.
O’Sullivan shows due scepticism about the idea that Jane urged Oscar to stay and face prison, but Jane’s miserable last days in London during Oscar’s imprisonment are rendered with sympathy, as is Willie’s decline and early death. In an epilogue, O’Sullivan asserts: “Though the inhabitants of the houses fell, the Wilde name survives. It stands for what is singular, independent-minded and fearless.”
The Fall of the House of Wilde does justice to the name of Wilde.
Eibhear Walshe teaches English at University College Cork. His books include the novel The Diary of Mary Travers (Somerville Press, 2014) and Oscar’s Shadow: Wilde, Homosexuality and Ireland (Cork University Press, 2012)
‘The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family’, by Emer O’Sullivan
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JUNE 17, 2016 by: Review by Suzi Feay
There have been many biographies of Oscar Wilde. Emer O’Sullivan justifies hers by presenting him not in brilliant isolation but as part of an eminent Anglo-Irish family — just one actor in a compelling intergenerational tragedy. His father was the prominent Dublin doctor and folklorist Sir William Wilde, and his mother Jane was better known as the firebrand political poet “Speranza”. Together with Oscar’s feckless brother Willie, they rose to dizzy prominence and fell to ignominious depths.
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Overall it’s a melancholy story; only William senior got off relatively lightly, dying in 1876 aged 61 while still a revered public figure. Even so, he and his wife had suffered a mortifying libel case, a tragic irony in view of the one that was to bring about his son’s downfall in 1895. The young Oscar was sent hurriedly away to school as the scandal broke; just as his own sons Cyril and Vyvyan would be whisked off in their turn to escape their father’s shame.
William was a Victorian polymath, spewing out learned books. A renowned expert in aural medicine, he was appointed Queen Victoria’s doctor in Ireland (not much work involved there, since she never visited the country). As passionate a patriot as his wife, he devoted his spare time to compiling Irish folklore and helped inaugurate the Celtic Revival, the movement that sought to reclaim the dignity of Irish history and culture. Jane had advocated direct action in the uprising of 1848, and her poems made her a national heroine.
Oscar and his elder brother Willie thus grew up in an unconventional, liberal milieu of ardent talkers and writers. This early training surely helped Oscar to become one of the era’s finest conversationalists. Jane, a noted bluestocking, held celebrated salons in the Wilde house in Dublin’s Merrion Square, where wit and erudition rather than social status took precedence. Her son’s noted sympathies in later life towards clerks and telegraph boys perhaps partly had its root in Jane’s egalitarianism.
The brothers lived for pleasure; Willie seems to have had some of Oscar’s brilliance without even his minimal work ethic
After Sir William’s death, the family fortunes faltered and the three Wildes moved to London. Except for brief periods when Oscar’s plays were hits, financial security eluded them all. The brothers rebelled against Victorian “earnestness” (memorably parodied by Oscar in his most celebrated play) by living for pleasure; Willie seems to have had some of Oscar’s brilliance without even his minimal work ethic. Both were riddled with laziness, charm and complacency.
Without being in any way a feminist biography, The Fall of the House of Wilde vividly brings out the crushing despair of Oscar’s devoted wife Constance, and the slow slide into destitution of the formerly bejewelled and dazzling Jane. The erstwhile darling of Dublin, the revolutionary poet was finally forced to petition an indifferent English government for a tiny pension.
At least when we read of the bitter desolation of Oscar’s latter years, we are consoled by his sparkling talent and continued fame. But nothing leavens the misery when reading about Jane’s bravely endured penury, or Willie’s alcoholism. Willie’s lively journalistic pieces lived for a day and Jane’s poems, briefly quoted here, don’t invite further investigation. I couldn’t help thinking their sad stories would be better left in obscurity.
As O’Sullivan notes, the family ultimately paid a high price for promoting “liberal values at odds with contemporary mores”. Oscar came to personify the fin de siècle; as his friend, the poet Richard Le Gallienne, explained: “In [Oscar] the period might see its own face in the glass. And it is because it did see its own face that it first admired, then grew afraid, and then destroyed him.”
When Sir William Wilde died, his funeral cortège was, as a newspaper reported, “one of the most imposing that had been witnessed in [Dublin] for a long time”. Sir William was lowered into a vault with plenty of room for his family to join him in due course. In a telling aside, O’Sullivan adds “except none would do so”. Oscar Wilde of course rests beneath a noble monument at Père Lachaise in Paris. Learning that Jane and Willie lie in unknown, unmarked graves leaves the reader with the saddest pang of all.
The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family, by Emer O’Sullivan, Bloomsbury, RRP£25, 512 pages
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WILDE
Oscar Wilde and His Family
by Emer O'Sullivan
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A lively biography chronicles Oscar Wilde’s unconventional Victorian family.
O’Sullivan makes her literary debut with a family history of the Wildes: father William, a physician and Irish historian; outspoken poet and essayist Jane, “dubbed Ireland’s Madame Roland” for her revolutionary views; Willie, their dissolute firstborn son; and, of course, Oscar (1854-1900), whose work, coterie of friends and lovers, and notorious trial for indecency comprise O’Sullivan’s main focus. Family members’ relationships with one another were often strained and, in the sons’ adulthood, centered on money woes, a recurring theme in the biography. Jane was a rebel, but O’Sullivan does not support the assertion that she was a “soulmate” to both her sons, nor that she was, like Oscar, “a paradox—an intellectual coquette, unmarked by the stamp of her time and indifferent to public approval.” On the contrary, Oscar emerges very much stamped by his artistic milieu and desperate for public approval. His trial echoed that of his father, who also incited a scandal when a lover sued him for libel; her “protracted smear campaign” provided delicious gossip for Dublin society. William died in 1876, leaving his family deep in debt. Financial troubles beset Jane for the rest of her life, forcing her to beg for money from Oscar, also dogged by debt. As a young man, the gregarious Willie seemed as brilliant as his younger brother, only kinder and more convivial. He studied law and then became a journalist, but he occupied himself with drink, courtesans, and prostitutes. Jane indulged him, all the while complaining to Oscar. O’Sullivan exuberantly recounts Willie’s marriage to the redoubtable American newspaper titan Mrs. Frank Leslie, who thought the dapper Englishman (more than 15 years younger than she) would satisfy her sexually. He did not, and she divorced him. Drawing largely on published sources (biographies, letters, and the protagonists’ own writings), the author weaves a brisk narrative of the family’s, and Ireland’s, troubles.
A familiar portrait of Oscar with a fresh look at his eccentric relatives.
Pub Date: Oct. 4th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60819-987-7
Page count: 512pp
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 4th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15th, 2016
The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family
Image of The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family
Author(s):
Emer O'Sullivan
Release Date:
October 3, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
Bloomsbury Press
Pages:
512
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Vinton Rafe McCabe
“Emer O’Sullivan’s The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family seems the Oscar. And isn’t that the greatest thing that any biographer can achieve?”
The Fall of the House of Wilde, Emer O’Sullivan’s terrific new biography of Oscar Wilde (and family), starts off by issuing something that may be seen as a promissory note:
“Biographies of Oscar Wilde typically treat him in isolation. He is seen as an outsize personality and everything tends to be reduced to personal terms. What gets overlooked is the vibrant and tumultuous milieu in which he grew up. Oscar was the son of two immense personalities who were at the centre of Irish society. More than most children, he was imbued with the loyalties and loathings of his parents, their politics, their erudition, their humour and, one might add, their predisposition to calamity.”
And it concludes with the sort of concluding statement that the reader, having arrived upon it, sighs with contentment and a sense of having been told a very, very good story:
“The Wildes inverted the American dream—they went from riches to rags. They belong to our century of celebrity, excess, laughter and scandal. Though the inhabitants of the house fell, the Wilde name survives. It stands for what is singular, independent-minded and fearless.”
Let’s start out by saying Emer O’Sullivan, throughout the entirety of the text, creates sentences of such complex opaline beauty that her book might just as rightly be categorized poetry as biography. And let’s agree that this work is an achievement in another way: It is very likely the finest of all the many biographies of Wilde. Indeed, it is among the best, if not the very best itself, of all the literary biographies brought into print in the last few years.
Of course, her first and best decision was in choosing Oscar Wilde, famous wit, cutting-edged fop, notorious homosexual, and author of such works as The Importance of Being Earnest and The Portrait of Dorian Gray, as her subject. No one was ever more outsized in talent, ego, and/or personality.
Except perhaps for his brother, Willie Wilde, who managed to slide from being an important London theater critic to becoming an exemplar of those Victorian gents who suffered from the condition known as “work shy,” the typical symptoms of which included lying about the house, not paying one’s bills, drinking copious amounts of whisky, and sighing.
Or their father, Sir William Wilde, once “appointed oculist to Queen Victoria,” who, becoming embroiled in an extramarital affair, also became the target of rape charges and the subject of a scandalous trial that presaged this son’s own.
Or their mother, Lady Jane Wilde, about whom other books should be written. Because she really shouldn’t have to share with her husband and sons. She was in turns a famous bluestocking, a leading Irish author, a social critic, and a visionary mother to her sons, allowing them to develop equally both the best and worst aspects of their personalities, and the spiritual mother to a generation of Irish poets, including William Butler Yeats.
That the father William and son Oscar both fall into scandal and ruin for sexual malfeasance (as well as a refusal to obey the class system that frowned upon their seeking relationships with members of the lower classes) combined with a sort of hubris of denial, and that all four descended into one form of poverty or another—Jane perhaps suffering in the greatest degree, as she lay dying, hoping that the son she had so doted on, Oscar, would come and rescue her—gives our author such a wealth of material that it would stagger a lesser writer.
But O’Sullivan rises to the occasion with scrupulous research, a keen organizational ability, a passion for her subjects and, most important, a rare gift for language.
As here, when she writes about such a simple thing—how baby Oscar got his name:
“Jane gave birth to a son on 16 October 1854. He was named Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde. Only O’Flahertie bears the trace of an ancestral ghost. It comes from the unruly Gaelic clan on William’s mother’s side, possibly a witty reference to the ancestral rebellious streak in this blatantly un-Anglo name. ‘Oscar’ and ‘Fingal’ derive from the Celtic mythology made famous by James Macpherson’s Ossian poems—Oscar is Fingal’s grandson, and son of the poet Ossian. Telling Hilson of the name they had chosen, Jane wrote, ‘Is not that grand, misty, Ossianic?’”
With these four oversized folk vying for the reader’s attention, The Fall of the House of Wilde (and please let it be made into a miniseries on Netflix) is an example of literary biography as page-turner. It is a book filled with exploits that make the reader’s eyes pop, and that leads to body aches, both from laughter and tears.
Somehow Emer O’Sullivan manages to make even the book’s exploration of the most familiar moment in Oscar Wilde’s life—his libel suit against the Marquis of Queensbury, father of Wilde’s homosexual lover, that ends up landing poor Oscar in prison and at hard labor, which caused him to quip, “If this is how Queen Victoria is going to treat her prisoners, then she doesn’t deserve to have any.”—seem new and exciting. As if filmed from a different angle or edited with more finesse. In her telling of it, the stakes are high and the tensions are real:
“Other names rolled out of Carson’s lips and Oscar was found to have given them all money and presents, receiving nothing in return but the pleasure of their company. Then Oscar made a slip of the tongue. Carson questioned Oscar about a youth named Walter Grainger, a sixteen-year-old waiter he had come across in Oxford.
“Carson: Did you ever kiss him?
“Oscar: Oh, dear not! He was a peculiarly plain boy.
“Carson jumped at this: Was that the reason you did not kiss him?
“Flustered and indignant, all Oscar could blurt out was, ‘Oh! Mr. Carson: You are pertinently insolent.”
“Carson persisted and Oscar was reported to be ‘nearing the verge of tears.’ He tried several answers but was unable to finish any of them. Carson kept up his monosyllabic bark, ‘Why? Why? Why did you add that?’ All Oscar could say was ‘you sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me—and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously.’ The damage was done.”
It seems likely an impossible thing to read this biography of these four mad fools (and poor Constance, the young beauty who marries Oscar Wilde and bears him two sons before becoming, as they say, The Last to Know) and not be moved by their suffering. Even though each has flaws large enough that you could wear them as an overcoat. Flaws so great that each seems to be enacting one of the Seven Deadly Sins, especially Willie, who gets Sloth down pat very early on.
It is perhaps Emer O’Sullivan’s greatest achievement that her characters come to life, bringing with them the world and culture in which they lived. She is generous with her details, putting her fingers down on many maps and tracing them for us, enlightening us about the politics of the day, and the way that the world seemed to those about whom she is writing.
In short, Emer O’Sullivan’s The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family seems the Oscar. And isn’t that the greatest thing that any biographer can achieve?
Vinton McCabe is a critic-at-large, whose running commentary of pop culture began more than 20 years ago in the pages of the Advocate Newspapers of CT and MA, continued on the pages of New England Monthly, and blared out of radios tuned to WGCH in Greenwich, and other Connecticut stations. He is the author of the novel Death in Venice, California.
Book review: The Fall of the House of Wilde
0
Saturday, August 27, 2016Review: Mary Leland
Oscar Wilde was the most famous — and notorious — of his family but they were already a wild bunch long before his scandalous downfall. Mary Leland reads between the lines of a chronicle of fortune and misfortune.
Emer O’Sullivan
Bloomsbury, €25
THERE’S always something slightly dubious about a title which is a steal from somebody else: in this case Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. The borrowing belies the book.
Horrible things happen to the Wildes of Dublin and London, but theirs is not a horror story. Nor was there ever really a House of Wilde.
There was no dynasty; ancestors yes in the sense that we all have ancestors, and of descendants only a few.
The jacket design superimposes the title on an image of Oscar Wilde, but while Oscar may have been the family’s social tragedy its downfall was already well in hand by the time of his imprisonment and exile.
But book and cover come to mind: these comments matter because the book is so much more than a familiar-sounding title and a recognisable face.
Emer O’Sullivan works her way diligently through the thickets of Wildean genealogy to arrive at its principal characters and locations and the first of her achievements is to place the family’s most notorious member within a domestic environment in which he was not by any means the most prominent or promising.
The chief personalities in this often-told story are Sir William Wilde, his wife Jane, their elder son Willie and his brother Oscar. A daughter, Isola, died aged 10 in 1867.
Later would come Oscar’s wife Constance and their two sons and, slightly more shadowy although yielding the Wilde’s only other descendant, Willie’s second wife, Lily, and their daughter Dorothy.
Lady Jane Wilde had preached the gospel of self-belief and practised what she preached as journalist, rebel, poet, wife, mother and prominent hostess with a salon at her home on Dublin’s Merrion Square.
Writing as ‘Speranza’ for The Nation, which was the mouthpiece of the Young Ireland movement, she admitted in a private letter that ‘Excitement is my genius’.
She was able to defend with some relish the controversies which beset her husband, and despite circumstances which would have overwhelmed others she never failed in her profound affection for and loyalty to her two sons.
Both she and Sir William were highly educated, widely read in Irish and European literature, politically well-connected, able to travel where their many cultural, literary and antiquarian interests took them, and given that as a physician William Wilde specialised in diseases of the eye and ear, alert to and involved in scientific and medical research.
In 1864 Wilde was knighted for his contributions to statistical science, a tool he used to highlight humanitarian issues.
It was something of a calamity therefore to find himself that same year a co-defendant with Jane in a libel action brought by a former patient and protegee, Mary Travers. (The Diary of Mary Travers by Eibhear Walsh is a fictional version of this affair.)
This was the first great scandal afflicting the family. Although the verdict was in favour of Mary Travers, she was awarded only a farthing’s damages.
Jane survived the experience with public aplomb; for Sir William, by now a doctor with an international reputation, the outcome was one of gradual decline into indifference. This was hastened by the death of Isola three years later.
Sir William also had a least three illegitimate children: a son who joined his professional practice, and two young daughters who were burned to death when their crinolines caught fire at a dance in county Monaghan a few years after the trial.
William retreated to his beloved fishing lodge in Connemara, to his work as an author and academician, and died as one of the most eminent Irishmen of his time in 1876.
By then the two Wilde boys were at university and becoming more than a little expensive.
Despite several attempts at a professional career Willie, reputedly the most promising of the greatly gifted brothers, declined at last into a drifting life fuelled by alcoholism and curtailed by inertia and debt.
Oscar was trapped by a different addiction; his great popular success — scandalous in itself given the nature of such works as The Picture of Dorian Grey — encouraged
notions and habits of extravagant glamour, or glamorous extravagance. Glamour, at any rate. And at any cost, including his marriage, which began to surrender to his distaste for the physical evidence of maternity.
In a letter to his biographer Frank Harris, he wrote that Constance had been ‘white and slim as a lily… in a year or so the flower-like grace had all vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed… Oh, nature is disgusting…it befouls the altar of the soul.’ In other words, Constance was pregnant.
No fear of that with Lord Alfred Douglas. This young aristocrat’s only recommendation was his physical beauty, but it enslaved Oscar Wilde even after the writer, felled at the peak of his theatrical success, had endured his trial and imprisonment and left for France.
Before this catastrophe, however, and before Oscar’s descent into the decadence which he allowed betray him, the most notable achievement of this book emerges.
Already thoroughly researched and rich with scholarship, it is from here that O’Sullivan’s narrative opens onto a glittering, fractious endless argument.
The subject is art and artists, the world of literary and dramatic criticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, poetry, Ruskin, Whistler and the aesthetic influences and pretensions of a world in which Oscar not only flowered but eclipsed most of his contemporaries.
O’Sullivan’s occasionally pretentious prose disappears in these chapters: her observations brighten in a spirited and authoritative commentary: ‘Few people entered Whistler’s domain without getting mugged in public, and Oscar was no exception’…’ she writes, while leading us to her account of the entrapment, the downfall, and the squalid ending of Oscar’s brilliant career and withered life. The gospel of self-belief failed him at the last.
But ‘The Fall’ had been ensured already by the failure of Sir William Wilde to provide for the future of his widow and sons.
Despite her fervent and heart-breaking efforts to keep her name in vogue, her family solvent, and her home secure, Lady Jane Wilde died in poverty.
Only Willie and his wife attended her funeral at Kensal Green in 1896. No memorial stone was erected to mark the grave where, as O’Sullivan writes, the woman thought in Ireland to be ‘the Aeolian Harp of her age’ was laid. Her remains were later dug up and re-buried at an unknown site.
Having trekked around Europe with her two sons, re-named Holland to avoid the taint of their imprisoned father, 40-year-old Constance died in 1898 and is buried in Genoa.
The two boys were sent back to relatives in England from where Cyril was killed fighting in the First World War while Vyvyan became a barrister. His son Merlin lives in France.
Oscar died in Paris in November 1900, was buried at Bagneaux; nine years later his remains were transferred to the city’s Pere Lachaise cemetery to lie under the monument designed by Jacob Epstein.
Book review: The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family by Emer O’Sullivan
by Alex Dean / May 19, 2016 / Leave a comment
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Published in June 2016 issue of Prospect Magazine
The Fall of the House of WildeBloomsbury, £25
Oscar Wilde was the Victorian era’s arch aesthete: beauty, he thought, was valuable for its own sake. This set him apart from the puritanism of his day. So original was Wilde that it is easy to get the impression that his genius came fully formed from within, as though he were bestowed at birth with the ability to coin witticisms.
But in her enjoyable new biography of the Irish playwright, novelist and poet, Emer O’Sullivan argues that Wilde was made by the people around him. Chief among them was his mother, Jane Wilde. She hosted salons and captivated guests at the many dinner parties held at the Wildes’ Merrion Square address in Dublin, where Oscar grew up. O’Sullivan claims, plausibly, that Wilde learnt his formidable conversational skills by listening to the intellectual chatter at his parents’ table.
Wilde also inherited his mother’s patterns of speech. For example, she is quoted here telling her son: “We are above respectability!”—a deliciously Wilde-like phrase. Most importantly, though, she provided her son with constant support. This might go some way to explaining his resilience in the face of later public mockery.
It wasn’t just Jane who influenced Wilde. O’Sullivan argues that his father, William Wilde, had the same tendency towards calamity as Oscar. Artists such as the painter James Whistler are also cited as influences. However, while O’Sullivan does draw a few connections between Wilde’s childhood in Ireland and his work, this book could do with slightly more insight into Wilde’s writing rather than simply his personality.
Ultimately, while the personal life is fascinating, it’s his work that has the power to delight. That’s what we want to know about. Alex Dean