Oscar Wilde - De Profundis and Other Prison Writings

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The text of the letters, and the accompanying notes, first published in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, and published in Great Britain, by Fourth Estate Ltd, 2000.
Letters and notes reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2013

Copyright The Estate of Oscar Wilde, 1962, 1985, 2000
Introduction and additional editorial material Colm Tibn, 2013

Cover: Detail from Oscar Wilde by Maggi Hambling, 1985.
Oil on canvas, diptych. By Kind permission of the artist (Photograph: Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-140-43990-8

OSCAR FINGAL OFLAHERTIE WILLS WILDE was born in Dublin in 1854, his father an eminent eye-surgeon and his mother a national poet who wrote under the pseudonym of 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 after his finals, and was forced to earn a living by 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 as a modern writer with an original talent, 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 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 De Profundis, his long confessional letter to Douglas, and 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.

COLM TIBN is the author of six novels, including The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004) and Brooklyn (2009), and two story collections, Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). His essay collections are Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodvar (2002), All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James (2010) and New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (2012). He is Irene and Sidney Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.