He wanted to address his notorious relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the fin-de-siècle romance that had swiftly become a fatal tragedy. In his cell, between January and March 1897, in preparation for his release from Reading jail in April, Oscar Wilde began to write an extraordinary letter. Our very dress makes us grotesques… the zanies of sorrow” Everything about my tragedy has been hideous. A lesser artist might have been broken by that fall, but Wilde was ultimately inspired by it. For a tantalisingly brief period, until the summer of 1894, when he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest in three weeks, Wilde blazed like a meteor across Victorian London before crashing and burning at his Old Bailey trial (after the disaster of the Queensberry libel case) in May 1895. By the spring of 1882, when he went to America declaring his “genius”, he was doubly celebrated in both the United States and England (where Gilbert and Sullivan had just satirised Wilde’s aesthetic movement in the character of the poet Bunthorne in Patience), as much for himself as for his writing.
Long before he secured his place in Britain’s pantheon of great dramatists, he had established himself as the witty icon of an aesthetic ideal.
I n life and death, Oscar Wilde possessed a unique self-mythologising genius.
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