The Ballad of Reading Gaol: (Oscar Wilde Classics Collection) - Softcover

Wilde, Oscar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1506195008 ISBN 13: 9781506195001

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

About this title

About the Author:

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death. Wilde's parents were successful Anglo-Irish Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.

From the Inside Flap:

'This edition does full justice to Wilde’s harrowing masterpiece with outstanding illustrations by Peter Hay.

‘I have seldom seen the Ballad illustrated with more simple power and by someone who hasn’t just read it, but obviously knows a good deal about Wilde’s life in prison and has felt his way under Oscar’s skin for the duration of that terrible experience’
Merlin Holland

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1506195008
• ISBN 13: 9781506195001
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208