The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde - Softcover

McKenna, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099415453 ISBN 13: 9780099415459

Publisher: Arrow, 2004

Synopsis

‘I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work’.

So said Oscar Wilde of his remarkable life – a life more complex, more erotic, more troubled and more triumphant than any of his contemporaries ever knew or suspected.

Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld.
Oscar Wilde emerges as a man driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with men, and Neil McKenna argues compellingly and convincingly that Oscar’s Wilde’s life and work can only be fully understood and appreciated in terms of his sexuality.

The book draws of a vast range of sources, many of them previously unpublished, and includes startling new material like the statements made to the police by the male prostitutes and blackmailers ranged against Oscar Wilde at his trial which have been lost for over a century.

Dazzlingly written, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.

About this title

Product Description:

Neil McKenna argues that our view of Oscar Wilde, even after Ellman's magisterial biography of the great author and playwright, is determined by Victorian sentimentality. In his own much more modern version of Wilde's story, McKenna portrays the literary genius as being not only extremely promiscuous but also a sort of campaigner for sexual freedom. He reveals, for example, that Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, which provided the inspiration for the classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, was not an idealistic doting on a beautiful boy, but that Lord Douglas was the more dominant and experienced of the pair, who used to go out hunting together for young boys. Wilde's last days in Paris were not, McKenna shows, miserable and defeated; Paris was for him an idyllic, sensual and intellectual playground free from the narrowness of London. A groundbreaking book on Victorian sexuality, this unique biography reassesses the stereotypical views of Oscar Wilde and thoroughly embraces his sexuality, as Wilde did himself.

Review:

"Intriguing and entertaining...McKenna makes an impassioned case for re-gaying Wilde" (The Times)

"A groundbreaking new biography of our greatest queer martyr" (Observer)

"It cannot be recommended too highly. Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful" (Manchester Evening News)

"This is by far and away the best biography of Oscar Wilde to date" (John McRae, Professor of Literature)

"A bold book" (The Guardian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0099415453
• ISBN 13: 9780099415459
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 752