There were indeed moments of despair but also of joy, laughter and adventure, at least until his health deteriorated. But he makes you see the same events in a different light. He does not seek to overturn every bit of evidence showing that Wilde was having a bad time of it. He died a different person altogether to the great man he had once been.įrankel grants that the final years had tough moments for Wilde, and that his health declined at the end is a matter of documented fact. He became terminally ill and was unable to produce much new work of value. After meeting him in 1899, the writer and artist Laurence Housman described him as “a man haunted.” Vincent O’Sullivan, one of Wilde’s earliest biographers, suggested that he spent so much time in Parisian bars because “he would go mad if he sat alone with his bitter thoughts.”Īnd Wilde really did return to Douglas, about whom he had written so contemptuously in his love-hate letter De Profundis. Wilde, who was legally forbidden from seeing his two children, wrote that he had “lost wife, children, fame, honour, position and wealth.” To signal his new life, Wilde re-baptised himself Sebastian Melmoth, after the beautiful tortured Saint Sebastian, and the character in Charles Maturin’s Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, who sells his soul to the Devil.Īnd upon his release? There are a good number of accounts that paint Wilde in rather a dim light. The last time Wilde saw his wife Constance was in prison, when she visited to break the news of his mother’s death. If Frankel is right he was even more extraordinary than we previously imagined.įrankel needs to work pretty hard to make his case. Wilde was a resilient man, who throughout his life shrugged off the judgment of men with smaller natures than him. The premise of The Unrepentant Years is a bold one-but it’s not implausible. Far from withering away, he staged a defiant comeback. Frankel goes so far as to claim that it was during the last three years of his life that Wilde was finally allowed to become himself. He returned to top form, delighting company with his wit, which had not been blunted by prison. He lives only a half life.īut Frankel’s excellent book argues that, far from being ruined, Wilde mounted a remarkable recovery after his release. Everett’s Wilde bumbles pathetically from one humiliation to the next: from public beatings by teenagers to begging for money from former admirers.
This exceptional new biopic-a labour of love for Rupert Everett, who writes, directs and stars in the film-is a moving and unsettling portrayal of Wilde’s final days. Wilde wasted away until his death in 1900, aged only 46, thus completing the tragic arc.Ĭertainly this is the narrative line pursued in The Happy Prince. In miserable exile on the continent, he fell into a depression, no longer resembling the brilliant charmer he had once been, bouncing from run-down hotel to run-down hotel and despised by those he had once called friends. The conventional view is that after his release from Reading gaol in 1897, Wilde was “a broken, tragic figure” languishing in self-pity, and pining for his ex-lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years takes the story of Wilde’s demise and turns it on its head. But Nicholas Frankel, a respected Wilde scholar, is sceptical of such myth-making. Wilde’s story has become a legend, retold a thousand times in books, on stage and screen.
WAS OSCAR WILDE GAY IN LATER LIFE TRIAL
His tragic fall after his humiliating trial for “gross indecency” is a story as famous as any of his plays-perhaps more so. Then, of course, there is the Irish writer’s remarkable personal story. And a successful season of his plays at the Vaudeville Theatre culminates with Wilde’s greatest work, The Importance of Being Earnest, which starts on 20th July. The Picture of Dorian Gray has become a haunting classic. His children’s stories, poems and political essays captivate us today just as they captivated his contemporary audience. Nearly 120 years after his death, Oscar Wilde’s works continue to delight with their brilliant paradoxes and comic twists. Oscar Wilde's tomb in Paris, where the writer lived during his final years.
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