Wilde Oscar - The secret life of Oscar Wilde: [an intimate biography]

Achieving the rare distinction of making the familiar fresh, McKenna takes an unvarnished look at the life of the 19th-century poet and playwright whose bold sense of style and rapier wit rivaled his decadent lifestyle for notoriety.

Rocky Mountain News

Drawing on newly discovered interviews with some of the witnesses at [Wildes] trials, as well as numerous unpublished memoirs and diaries, Neil McKenna has produced a superb new portrait of the secret life of one of the 19th centurys most tragic and beguiling figures.... This meticulous reconstruction of Wildes sexual journey breaks important new ground by placing Wilde at the center of a pantheon of gay sexual revolutionaries.

The Washington Post

Although dozens of books have been written about Wilde, none has been as personal and intimate as The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. This crisply written book is a frank and disarming psychological portrait of a troubled genius. This is fascinating reading and highly recommended.

Tucson Citizen

[A] stunning piece of investigative historiography... this extraordinary book... gives a new and revealing portrait of Wildes sexuality that supersedes all previous Wilde biographies. The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde must now rank as a crucial, hitherto missing, but terribly vital piece of both gay and literary historyand it is beautifully written to boot. It is both a major achievement and a wonderful read.

In These Times

Richly detailed and revelatory... a thoroughly researched and often mesmerizing account of an indispensable writer.

Atlantia Journal-Constitution

This thorough and harrowing book gives us the information we need to assess Oscar Wildes place in the creation of modern Western culture and in the history of gay rights. Previous biographies have tended to portray Wilde as either a genius with an occasional but fatal weakness for boys, or as a heroic martyr of gay liberation. By reviewing all the publicly available material and uncovering important new sources from an era in which every educated person kept diaries and wrote several letters a day, Neil McKenna scrupulously documents Wildes sexual life and demonstrates its connection to his art, his ethical evolution, and his tragedy.

Gay and Lesbian Review

McKennas masterful, eminently readable new work takes a sharp, very productive turn in Wilde scholarship... the most exciting and important Wilde scholarship to be published in decades.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Offers an entertaining and fascinating (sometimes jaw-dropping) insight into Victorian homosexual practices. He is outstanding...

The Observer (UK)

The most important [book] to have been written about Wilde for many years.

Irish Independent

It cannot be recommended too highly. Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful.

Manchester Evening News

Intriguing and entertaining... McKenna makes an impassioned case for re-gaying Wilde.

Times of London

A groundbreaking new biography of our greatest queer martyr.

The Observer (UK)

A bold book.

The Guardian

There is nothing Wilde would desire more than that we should know everything about him.

W.H. Auden

What a lurid life Oscar does lead so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century.

Max Beerbohm

Nothing is serious except passion.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde always knew that the story of his emotional and sexual life, and especially the story of his disastrous affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, would one day be told in full. Some day the truth will have to be known: not necessarily in my lifetime or in Douglass, he wrote shortly before his release from Reading Gaol.

This biography sets out to tell that story, to chart Oscars odyssey to find his true sexual self, from the troubled and uncertain first stirrings of his feelings for other men, to the joyous paganism of his last years in exile. It was a journey of self-discovery with more than its fair share of love and lust, joy and despair, comedy and tragedy.

Despite many excellent biographies and critical studies, comparatively little has been written about Oscars sexuality and his sexual behaviour. Most accounts of Oscars life present him as predominantly heterosexual, a man whose later love of men was at best some sort of aberration, a temporary madness and, at worst, a slow-growing cancer, a terrible sexual addiction which slowly destroyed his mind and his body.

But the truth, as Oscar famously remarked, is rarely pure and never simple. Like many men of his time, Oscar struggled long and hard against his overwhelming sexual feelings for young men, before he decided to surrender to them. As time went by, he not only surrendered to these sexual feelings, but embraced them, and eventually became a brave champion of the Love that dare not speak its name.

For years, Oscar had a secret sexual and emotional life. He was a husband and a father, a poet and a playwright, a wit and a dandy, and a lover of young men. He was torn between the desire to proclaim the existence of his secret life and the need to conceal it. These conflicting imperatives fired Oscars creativity and found expression in his writing.