Merlin Holland has researched the life and work of his grandfather Oscar Wilde for over 40 years. After Oscar, his superbly written account of Wilde’s posthumous obloquy and eventual rehabilitation, is by a long chalk the best study of Wilde to have emerged in recent years.

After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal
MERLIN HOLLAND

(EUROPA EDITIONS, 800 PP, £30)
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In 1895, Oscar Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” (Victorian-era code for homosexuality) and jailed. In Britain at that time, sodomy carried a sentence of servitude for life: prigs protested that Wilde had got off lightly with just two years. On his release in 1897 he absconded to the continent with the deplorable Lord Alfred Douglas. Soon after, Wilde’s long-suffering wife, Constance, died. Wilde had inflicted agonies on Constance and their two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, whose surnames Constance had changed to Holland in order to protect them. In 1900, addicted to cigarettes and bloated from quantities of absinthe, the 46-year-old Wilde died in a Paris hotel, having converted to Catholicism.

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