Fine and dandy

The Fall of the House of Wilde. By Emer O’Sullivan. Bloomsbury; 495 pages; £25. To be published in America in October; $35.

AS A child, Oscar Wilde announced that he would like to be remembered as the hero of a “cause célèbre 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 lesser-canonised 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.”

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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 drawing-room dramas, where style was paramount—but 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 imprisonment—the climax of any biography of the writer—readers 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 children—who dropped the surname “Wilde” as a result of the scandal—is 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 history—his 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 fanfare—without name or record…in soil to which she did not belong”.