Oscar Wilde: An Exquisite Life

Oscar Wilde was without question the central literary figure of the fin de siecle, and, in his own words, 'a man who stood in symbolic relation to his times'.

Celebrated first as a poet and writer of brilliant essays and charming fables, he was also a perceptive critic and an incisive moral and political thinker.

Today, however, his fame rests mainly on his novel of artistic decadence, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', and the ever-popular 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.

From his first notoriety in the 1880s when he carried the message of the aesthetic movement to America, and through to the height of his fame as a wit raconteur in the dizzy social whirl of London in the early 1890s, he had the world at his feet.

But then it all went tragically wrong: following his love-affair with 'Bosie', the young and aristocratic Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde was persecuted by Douglas's, father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was put on trial for homosexual offences, and sentenced to two years imprisonment in Reading Gaol.

He spent the last, tragic years of his life in France, supported by a handful of loyal friends, but shunned by those who had courted him in the days of his glory.

Bibliographical note: Although the front cover states, 'Oscar Wilde an exquisite life' the title page states 'The exquisite Life of Oscar Wilde' and that is how it is catalogued above.

Stephen Calloway is Associate Curator of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He travels all over the world lecturing on the 1890s. He is a worldexpert on the art of Aubrey Beardsley and is the Curator of a major exhibition to be staged at the V&A on the work of Beardsley in 1998. Most recently he was consultant on the film The Portrait of a Lady directed by Jane Campio