PENGUIN CLASSICS

The Decay of Lying and Other Essays

Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, his father an eminent eye-surgeon and his mother a nationalist poet who wrote under the pseudonym Speranza. He went to Trinity College, Dublin, and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or Art for Arts Sake) Movement. Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford fellowship, and was forced to earn a living by public lecturing and writing for periodicals. He published a largely unsuccessful volume of poems in 1881 and in the next year undertook a lecture tour of the United States in order to promote the DOyly Carte production of Gilbert and Sullivans comic opera Patience . After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Saviles Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation, confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his society comedies Lady Windermeres Fan , A Woman of No Importance , An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest , all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.

Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglass father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol . He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.