Oscar’s Mother

In honor of Oscar Wilde’s birthday, October 16, here is another outtake from Oscar’s Ghost. It seemed appropriate day to share a piece about Oscar’s mother. Before Oscar Wilde’s second criminal trial, he was released on bail, and many of his friends (including Lord Alfred Douglas) were urging him to flee the country. But his mother and brother urged him to stay and stand trial. They were optimistic about his chances in court. A section of Oscar’s Ghost that talked about Lady Wilde’s own experience with the courts did not make it into the final version, but here it is:

Oscar’s… mother Lady Jane Wilde…had made herself known with a bold act of defiance. In 1848, the editor of The Nation, Gavan Duffy was being tried for treason for printing a subversive article “Jacta Alea Est” (The Die is Cast) published under the pen name Speranza. When the attorney general read an excerpt of the article, Lady Wilde, who had been watching from the gallery, sprung to her feet and announced, “I am the criminal who, as the author of the article that has just been read, should be in the dock. Any blame in respect of it belongs to me.”

Like Bosie, Lady Wilde believed in Truth with a capital “T.” Her 1864 collection Poems, dedicated to her two sons, had as its theme “The Freedman is he whom the Truth makes free.” In the introduction she cited Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Oh! give me truths,

For I am weary of the surfaces,

And die of inanition.

She was no stranger to legal battles over the family’s reputation. Three decades before, Lady Wilde had, herself, been involved in a bitter and highly publicized libel case full of sexual intrigue. Oscar’s father, William Wilde, had earned himself a reputation as a womanizer and it was an open secret that he had fathered a number of illegitimate children. In the late 1850s, he formed an intimate friendship with a young patient named Mary Travers. The exact nature of that friendship was never proved, but it was undoubtedly more than professional, as Wilde sent the teenager letters “of an extraordinary character…a dangerous character to subsist between a girl of her age and attractions and a man, whether married or single…”

Initially, Mrs. Wilde had been friendly with the girl, even allowing Travers to take the boys out on outings. Eventually, however, things took a bad turn and Wilde tried to end the relationship. After that Travers embarked on a campaign of harrassment that made the Marquess of Queensberry look like a paragon of restraint. She would appear at the Wilde home and at Dr. Wilde’s office demanding money, a turn of events that may have let to the family decision to send the children from Dublin to Portora School as boarders.

Once she appeared in Wilde’s study holding a bottle of laudanum, a common Victorian medicine made up of alcohol and opium. She poured the full bottle into a wine glass and drank it. Wilde rushed her to the nearest apothecary’s for an antidote. He believed she was trying to make the world believe he had poisoned her. A few days later she wrote to him in the role of patient, seeking an appointment to examine a corn on her foot This unconventional request for a consultation ended with an ominous warning: “I will keep your nose to the grindstone while your wife is away, and when she returns I will see her.”

Wilde agreed to see her, and she would later claim that in the course of the visit he strangled and raped her. After that her behavior became even more bizarre. She had her own obituary printed up in the newspaper and sent a copy to Mrs. Wilde with a drawing of a coffin underneath it. Whatever result she had been hoping for with the stunt failed to materialize, and so she printed up a pamphlet featuring an anti-Wilde poem and hired five newsboys to sell them on the street. She also had them delivered to the Wilde’s home. There Jane Wilde had an altercation with the newsboy who had been sent to try to sell the pamphlet. She kept it without paying for it.

She had finally had enough and she fired off a letter to her tormentor’s father, Dr. Robert Travers:

Sir – You may not be aware of the disreputable conduct of your daughter at Bray, where she consorts with all the low newsboys in the place, employing them to disseminate offensive placards in which she makes it appear that she has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde. If she chooses to disgrace herself that is not my affair; but as her object in insulting me is the hope of extorting money, for which she has several times applied to Sir William Wilde, with threats of more annoyance if not given, I think it right to inform you that no threat or additional insult shall ever extort money for her from our hands. The wages of disgrace she has so loosely treated for and demanded shall never be given her. Jane F. Wilde

Travers took exception to the letter, especially to the phrase “the wages of disgrace,” which implied his daughter was a prostitute. He filed a writ for libel seeking damages of £2,000. Lady Wilde entered a plea of justification. The trial was certain to be a sensation with Isaac Butt, the nationalist MP acting as Traverse’s counsel and Speranza herself speaking for the defense. It was certain to shine a spotlight on Wilde’s indiscrete letters, and Traverse’s claim that she had been seduced as a teenager and then raped. This was all potentially devastating to the family. If the public believed her, William Wilde would be personally and professionally destroyed. The matter could have been handled out of court, but, biographer Gerard Hanberry wrote, “Jane would not countenance such surrender.”

The courtroom was packed for the four days of the trial and William Wilde’s private letters were quoted in the newspapers, but Speranza made a much better impression on the stand than the anxious girl did. She refused to admit Traverse had been her husband’s lover, instead she made it appear that the entire affair had been the product of a frenzied imagination. On December 19, 1864 the jury found in Travers’ favor, but awarded her only a farthing in damages. Because she had won the case, the substantial court costs fell to the Wildes. This was hardly a stunning legal victory. It was, however, a moral victory. Public sympathy was clearly with William Wilde and his wife, almost all of the newspapers sided with them and their social calendar remained full. Early in the year, Lady Wilde wrote to a friend in Sweden:

It was very annoying, but of course no one believed her story. All Dublin has called on us to offer their sympathy, and all the medical Profession here and in London have sent letters expressing their entire disbelief of the (in fact) impossible charge. Sir Wm. will not be injured by it, and the best proof is that his professional hours never were so occupied as now.

Vanishing Women

I was writing yesterday about Yoi Pawloska, also known as Yoi Maraini, a travel writer and free spirit who I became aware of because of a brief connection to Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde’s literary executor and one of the main characters in my forthcoming Oscar’s Ghost.

Her connection to my story is a society scandal in which the young woman, then known as Edith Buckley, left her husband and two children after she fell in love with Coleridge Kennard. Robert Ross was one of the people who tried to intervene to prevent a larger scandal.

The young lovers did not marry, and after her divorce a broken-hearted Yoi traveled Europe and wrote the first of many books.  They received mostly positive reviews, albeit reviews that used feminine adjectives like “charming” which denote something other than seriousness. Was her work really more lightweight than that of the many male poets who populate the edges of Oscar Wilde’s narrative? She was more prolific than many, and also worked as a journalist interviewing Mussolini for the Saturday Review.

Her granddaughter, the Italian novelist Dacia Maraini, would one day write, “…after two generations, the silence about her was more tenacious than the desire to remember her. She was surrounded by an aura of scandal– a solitary traveller, and adulteress abandoning husband and children to follow the man she loved, but with whom she wasn’t able to build a family, remarried later to a man ten years her junior. Things our family did not speak much about. Actually, to tell the truth, we did not speak of them at all.”

There was no great desire to remember Yoi.

Today I was reading a book and a reference came up to Dame Hariette Chick. She lived from 1875 to 1977.  One of the leading microbiologists of her day, she was instrumental in finding a cure for rickets. I had that moment of surprise, that I always do, to learn of an accomplished professional woman from another era. Each time I discover a woman like this she stands out as exceptional and singular.

Why is that? A few weeks ago, I watched a program on our local PBS station about the Van Hoosen farm, near my home, and the sisters who eventually ran it. One of them was Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen, a pioneering obstetrician.

I find myself wondering, how many “exceptions to the rule” do I have to encounter before I start to question whether “the rule” accurately reflects history?

History as a Straight Line

“Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge as representatives for all mankind.” -Frances Fitzgerald, American Myth, American Reality

Early in my college career, perhaps in my freshman year, I took a course on American Culture which used James Oliver Robinson’s American Myth, American Reality as a textbook.  I recorded the quote above in a journal of quotations I had just started collecting.

I thought of the quote again today when reading an article on revised AP U.S. history standards that will emphasize American exceptionalism.  The revisions were championed by conservative educators and politicians who felt that the previously released standards presented too negative a view of the country.  As Newsweek reported:

The Jefferson County school district in Colorado convened a board committee to review the curriculum, stating that all materials should promote “patriotism” and “respect for authority,” and “should not encourage or condone civil disorder.” The district stopped pursuing the review after hundreds of students walked out of classes in protest. The issue made it to the Republican National Committee, which passed a resolution accusing the AP U.S. framework of promoting “a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects,” and recommending that Congress withhold federal funding to the College Board pending a rewrite.

The squeaky wheel got the grease and the standards were revised again to try to make everyone on any side of the culture wars happy. One of the teachers who helped craft the redesign told Newsweek that their goal was to remove value judgments from the framework, and let facts speak for themselves.

Of course, history is not made up of “facts” the way mathematics is. History is made up of things that happened in the past between people of different cultures, ideologies, mindsets, and goals trying to survive cold winters, get enough to eat, and to live in society with one another. In the process they trade with one another, come up with economic systems, work, raise children, invent things, create art, fight over resources, practice religions, question their religions and prevailing philosophies, consider different elements of society part of the in-group or the out-group, they invent governing systems and sometimes become migrants or have wars. No nation ever was made up of people of a single mindset. Lots of things happened. Lots of people had lives that impacted other lives. Lots of people had perspectives. Out of the almost infinite pool of “things that happened” a historian must select certain things on which to focus.

For this reason the idea of history being “revisionist” is problematic. Rarely do our educators try to “revise” history by completely changing what happened, for example, saying the first president of the United States was not George Washington but Hiram Rodriguez. “Revisionist” histories are histories that focus on different aspects of the past.

The histories that we read in the good old days never did include all that happened to my ancestors and your ancestors in all its messy and wondrous complexity.  Historians ave to leave out of their stories all manner of events and people.  Early history text writers in the United States chose a patriotic narrative about an America whose ancestry is European, not Native American, Latino or Black. They chose to tell a story that focused on military and economic success with heroes from those realms. The past was already revised by these historians not to include the history of the card game whist, basket weaving, the story of some guy named Oziah who worked hard and followed the rules then died, changes in the way people have conceptualized love, slavery from the perspective of the enslaved, the War of 1812 from the Native American perspective, the biographies of all the people who ran for President and failed, nor did they choose to frame the account of the history of commerce and politics as background to a central narrative on the important business of creating art and culture or raising children or to begin the story of America in the mid-1800s with the first major wave of Jewish immigration. These are all stories that could have been told.

These days when people start fighting about how history should be taught to children, they largely argue about whose perspective should be included and who should be considered part of “us.” Is focusing on Civil Disobedience saying that America is bad and authority should be resisted or is it saying that African-Americans and working class laborers who staged sit ins are part of the American “us” and therefore events that were significant to African-Americans and the working poor are significant to us as Americans?

What rarely gets challenged, however, is the straight line narrative of American history. This can be summed up in the popular political poll question “Do you think the country is headed in the right direction?” The assumption is that history is a journey from something to something else. People on the left are more apt to see social change as progress (hence the label progressive) whereas conservatives are more apt to worry that social change is the beginning of a slippery downward slope to a chaotic society. What they have in common is that they see history as heading in a direction.

One of the sticking points in the AP framework debate was the interpretation of “manifest destiny.” Should it be presented in a positive light? What was a gain for the European settlers was a loss for the Native Americans. In either case, the underlying notion that there was something inevitable about this change is essentially intact. This is not the only way to view history. Richard Nisbett wrote in The Geography of Thought:

Japanese teachers begin with setting the context of a given set of events in some detail. They then proceed through the important events in chronological order, linking each event to its successor. Teachers encourage their students to imagine the mental and emotional states of historical figures by thinking about the analogy between their situations and situations of the students’ everyday lives. The actions are then explained in terms of these feelings. Emphasis is put on the “initial” event that serves as the impetus to subsequent events. Students are regarded as having good ability to think historically when they show empathy with the historical figures, including those who were Japan’s enemies. “How” questions are asked frequently— about twice as often as in American classrooms. American teachers spend less time setting the context than Japanese teachers do. They begin with the outcome, rather than with the initial event or catalyst. The chronological order of events is destroyed in presentation. Instead, the presentation is dictated by discussion of the causal factors assumed to be important (“ The Ottoman empire collapsed for three major reasons”). Students are considered to have good ability to reason historically when they are capable of adducing evidence to fit their causal model of the outcome.

What happened is the only thing that could have happened, and our job is to recognize is the road that got us there.

Thus, Nisbett writes “The fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of the Third Reich, and the American success in reaching the moon before the Russians, not to mention less momentous events, are routinely seen as inevitable by commentators, who, one strongly suspects, could not have predicted them.”

A month or so ago, you may recall, I ran a guest post by author Juliet Greenwood about her World War I novel “We That Are Left.” The article focused on the largely forgotten role of women on the battlefield.  The introduction to the post also pointed out that female writers outsold their male counterparts in the Victorian era and that women owned a large number of businesses in Colonial America.  Why do these facts come as a surprise? I suspect it is that these historical facts interfere with a nice seamless narrative about linear progress.

It is much easier to tell the dramatic story of increasing freedom for women– a straight line from corsets and arranged marriages to women’s suffrage, 1970s women’s lib, and then Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and female CEOs– if you leave out the women of previous ages who did the things we imagine they only later gained the right to do.

The Explosion of Their Own Myth of Fragile Womanhood

Guest posts are not a regular feature of this blog, but a few months ago I read an article on the site Women Writers, Women’s Books called Women and Myths in Storytelling.  I felt that the themes of Juliet Greenwood’s novel “We That Are Left” fit in very well with the regular themes of this blog and I asked her if she would be interested in writing a guest post. The historical novel deals with women who served on the front lines in World War I.

What struck me in particular was one line from the article: “What is most telling is that many of the men the women saved found it hard to deal with the explosion of their own myth of fragile womanhood in need of male guidance and protection…”

I must admit that I misread it when I first scanned the line thinking that it said that the women struggled with the explosion of their own myth of fragile womanhood. I found this intriguing because women as well as men are invested in maintaining certain cultural myths. Our sense of what it is to be feminine forms a bit of our own identities as women. Both men and women compare and contrast their individual identities to the mythic narratives. The ideals of identity, however, rarely match up with the messy reality of life. It turns out they never have.

So the women who fought in the Great War can be added to a long list of myth-busting women. As you will recall, I only recently learned that female writers outsold male-authored fiction in the 19th Century.  In the past year I learned from reading A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell that women of early U.S. history did not all live lives of quiet domesticity.

Russell writes of the late 1700s “Women were extraordinarily free during this period, most strikingly in their ability and willingness to leave their husbands…for many segments of eighteenth-century society, marriage did not have to be permanent… Far more women chose not to marry at all during this period than at any time in the first two hundred years of the United States. Researchers estimate that at least one-quarter of women living in late colonial American cities were not married… Many women in the eighteenth century not only worked in what later became exclusively male occupations but also owned a great number of businesses that would soon be deemed grossly unfeminine…Historians have estimated that as many as half of all shops in early American cities were owned and operated by women…Most upper-class ‘society’ taverns barred women, and respectable women rarely drank in taverns, but fortunately, most taverns were low class and most women were not respectable.”

This is all getting quite long for an introduction to a guest post, so without further ado, I will let Juliet Greenwood tell you about her research:

The Myth of Fragile Womanhood by Juliet Greenwood

“What is most telling is that many of the men the women saved found it hard to deal with the explosion of their own myth of fragile womanhood in need of male guidance and protection.”

The thing that fascinated me most when I was researching the lives of women in the UK just before, and during, the First World War, was just how central the image of woman was to Edwardian society, colouring its view of how the world was, and naturally should be.

I was familiar with the image of women in Victorian novels, with their impossible skirts and lack of any independent life, but that seemed far back in history. Another time, another place. They do things differently there. But this was different. I come from a family of late starters, so my grandfather was married, and my father born, before women achieved the vote. A long time ago, but in the history of humankind, less than a breath away from where we are now. Touching distance.

The young men who went off to fight the First World War were raised on Boy’s Own adventures, full of daring do, fearless heroes saving the world and civilization (generally from foreigners and the lower orders), in which women appeared only to be saved, and to be the reason for saving civilization at all. Women were the Angel of the Hearth, the centre of the domestic sphere. They were physically fragile, intellectually weak. Their role was to produce the next generation of fine young men, and to be the quiet, supportive, modest (as in self-effacing) figure her husband needed after a long day saving the empire.

It was this image of the Angel of the Hearth that was often used against those unnatural women who longed for higher education, financial independence, or even the vote. Intellectual activity, it was argued, damaged a woman’s reproductive capacity, and unbalanced their fragile emotional state. In short, it was quite likely to send them unhinged. As for financial independence and the vote – well that was only desired by women too ugly, or too old, to attract a husband, as the anti-suffrage posters of the time loudly proclaimed.

What soon became clear, was that this image was outdated even before the Great War began. For one thing, women already outnumbered men, leaving increasing numbers of women needing to find a way of supporting themselves, and therefore working for a living as clerks and teachers, as well as in domestic service. Women were beginning to make gains, against all the odds, in obtaining university education (although not able to take degrees), and become skilled professionals, such as doctors. The advent of the bicycle, and the recognition that women benefitted from exercise, meant that women were more active. And of course some women had always been adventurers, climbing mountains, sailing up the Nile and the Congo and trekking across deserts. At home, women could be on councils and on the board of school governers, and middle and upper class women organised charitable works and ran large estates.

What was striking about the advent of war was that it brought this huge clash between this image of womanhood and the reality into sharp focus, one that, with the advent of photography, could no longer be denied. When women first volunteered their services as ambulance drivers, they were laughed at, but the necessity of war changed that. Women soon became nurses and ambulance drivers on the frontline, they set up field hospitals, kept the country going back at home. Some of the most interesting were the female spies, working behind enemy lines, gathering vital information, often collected from ordinary women in occupied France and Belgium, who counted out beans and knitted into garments the numbers of troops passing their villages. The irony was that it was the assumption that women were weak, cowardly, and non-too-bright, that offered a form of protection.

Where these two worlds clashed, was when these young women guided men separated from their units, or wounded, to safety. No wonder the men found the hardest thing was their total dependence on the language skills, the quick thinking, and the bravery of these ‘fragile’ flowers. Not to mention their physical prowess as they led them over the Alps to avoid border guards.

It was a shaking of a picture of the world, both for men and women, and although things have changed, it’s one that is still ongoing. The cult of the fragility of size zero, exchanging the dangerous crushing of the corset for the danger of the crumbling of malnourished bones, still presents an image at odds with the majority of women, who hold down jobs, while raising a family and juggling dreams and ambitions of their own. While James Bond (along with a parade of Hollywood heroes, some visibly well past retirement) is still the superhero, saving the world.

The image of man the hunter, man the warrior, is simple. It answers all the questions. The trouble is, it excludes the majority of the human race (of both sexes) who would rather not be either, thank you very much. It was the image that was used to argue that women didn’t need, or even want, the vote, even after Parliament (entirely made up of men) had twice democratically agreed that women should be given the right to vote. Many of those young women contributing to the war had been beaten up, sexually assaulted, tortured and abused in pursuit of their democratic rights in the face of this failure of democracy, while being informed roundly that they were acting out of ugliness and envy, and an incapacity to be a ‘real’ woman (as in weak, stupid and cowardly).

As I have been writing this post, outrage has been stirred in some quarters by the fact that in the new ‘Mad Max’ film a woman dares to bark orders at the hero, meaning that the feminists (as in ugly, envious and man-hating) have taken over, in a world gone mad.

Those incredibly brave, strong and resourceful young women, leading to safety the men whose worldview had just crumbled, must be smiling everso wryly. For the questions posed by their actions (conveniently forgotten, as is much of women’s history) are ones that still have not been answered – and still have the power to rock the world.

About Juliet

Juliet lives in a traditional Welsh quarryman’s cottage in North Wales, between Anglesey and the mountains of Snowdonia. As a child, Juliet always had her nose in a book. She wrote her first novel (an epic inspired by Rosemary Sutcliff and set in Saxon times) at the age of ten. After studying English at Lancaster University and King’s College, London, Juliet worked in a variety of jobs to support her writing, before finally fulfilling her ambition to become a published author.

As well as novels under her own name, Juliet writes serials and short stories for magazines as ‘Heather Pardoe’.

‘We That are Left’ was completed with the aid of a Literature Wales Bursary and was book of the Month for March 2014 for Waterstones Wales, The Books Council of Wales, and the National Museums of Wales. The kindle edition reached #4 in summer 2014.

Fame! I’m Gonna Live Forever… Or a Bit Before That…

Some people seek fame as a way to achieve a sort of immortality, but being hyper-known in your own time doesn’t guarantee that people of the next generation will remember your name.

I’m always fascinated to discover long-forgotten celebrities. This is Marie Corelli. My guess is you have not studied her works in your British Lit class, but she was at the turn of the last century one of the most successful writers alive. (She was a Victorian J.K. Rowling or Danielle Steel.) Her book sales were greater than those of contemporaries H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Rudyard Kipling combined.

As with most things popular, her works were often criticized for being too sensational and low-brow and her success annoyed some of her arguably more talented but less successful peers. Oscar Wilde, when in prison, was asked about Corelli and he responded “Now don’t think I’ve anything against her moral character, but from the way she writes she ought to be in here.” (Wilde’s publishing track record was far less successful than Corelli’s. He had only one book that could be said to have achieved best-seller status in his life time. It was not, as you might expect, The Picture of Dorian Gray but The Ballad of Reading Gaol.)

The wonderfully named Lilli Loofbourow wrote about Corelli’s fame in the Los Angeles Times:

It’s difficult to reconcile Corelli’s current near-total obscurity with her once vast literary footprint. Loyal readers named their children after her. Pages of her novels were found in the Boer trenches. Her fan base began with the eccentrics at society’s lower end and went all the way up to Queen Victoria. Corelli was the monarch’s favorite author, and if you think about it this makes perfect sense: her books are high flown, aspirational, unsubtle, workmanlike, idealistic, rich in pseudo-Shakespearean ruminations, pleasurable in an instructive way, siding with the virtuous but fully understanding — and reveling in — the value of a good villain: perfect bedtime reading for English queens.

Struggling writers have traditionally found comfort in the knowledge that the hacks who are celebrated today will be forgotten tomorrow and while an obscure poet like yourself might be the focus of English departments a century from now. Charles Dickens was nearly bankrupted, the thinking goes, and I am nearly bankrupted, so there is hope for my work yet. This is true, so far as it goes. Although there is certainly as much luck in what writers works survive as there is in which strike a chord in the present day. What is more, being appreciated posthumously may be better than not being appreciated at all, it doesn’t do much to improve the writer’s life. You won’t be around to know there is a journal where scholars debate your use of the word “and.” It doesn’t improve your standing with your friends. (“Hey, could you buy me a sandwich? I’m waiting on royalties.”)

It is good for writers to remember as well the wisdom of Bernard Shaw, “The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are ‘not for an age, but for all time’ has his reward in being unreadable in all ages.”

So, sadly, it is not a choice of appreciation in this world or the next. Nothing is guaranteed at all, and you just keep on writing. [I just discovered a book with the title The Honorably Obscure Handbook. I appreciate the title and the sentiment, although the links on this blog page to actually buy the book do not work, so I can’t vouch for the text itself.]

I learned something even more interesting from the Los Angeles Times article. Did you know that female authors were more popular in the 19th Century than male authors? I did not.

[As an aside, did you know that historians have estimated that as many as half of all shops in early American cities were owned and operated by women? I learned this fact only recently.]

Female-authored fiction was enormously popular throughout the 19th century (more so than male-authored fiction, in fact), but many more male than female authors have been rescued from obscurity by scholars, usually by being retrospectively credited with founding a subgenre. Tolkien and Haggard fit together roughly into one category (male-authored “high fantasy” adventure), and the gendering of their novels is so strict that it makes recognizing feminine predecessors all but impossible — not because they’re not there, but because the logic of the genre itself renders them unthinkable.

Loofbourow’s article argues that Corelli influenced Tolkien.

The audience for fiction has always been more female than male. Until recently, academia was made up almost entirely of males. To be popular in your own time was to strike a chord with women. To be studied as a serious artist meant to strike a chord with men.

Has this changed and will it change?

I don’t know. I’ll keep writing.

Oscar’s Wife

I recently finished reading Franny Moyle’s book Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde.  Constance Wilde is generally given short shrift in biographies of her husband. This book provided a much different perspective on the playwright’s life, and an important one. One of the things I took away from this book was just how many demands were being placed on Wilde in the years before his trials.

He was trying to capitalize on his new success as a playwright, he was courting the emotionally demanding Lord Alfred Douglas,  taking part in dinners and social events not to mention a notorious secret night life (seriously, don’t mention it), all the while maintaining his domestic role as a husband and father.  The domestic vantage point adds new dimensions to other, more well known, parts of his biography.

For example, in 1893, Wilde and Douglas had a series of arguments over Douglas’s translation of Wilde’s play Salome.  Wilde’s memory of the events were recorded in De Profundis.

“After a series of scenes culminating in one more than usually revolting, when you came one Monday evening to my rooms accompanied by two male friends, I found myself actually flying abroad next morning to escape from you, giving my wife some absurd reason for my departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you might follow me by the next train.”

Most of the biographies I have read of Wilde or Douglas which deal with this episode go on to describe the tensions in the relationship between the two men. After these rows (and the threat of a scandal involving some indiscretions by Wilde, Ross and Douglas) Wilde determined that Bosie should take a trip to Egypt and he wrote to Lady Douglas asking her to send him abroad.  Without the perspective of Constance, Wilde’s reasons for wanting some space from Douglas seem to be entirely about the young man’s character.

What Moyle makes clear is that Wilde was being pulled in two directions. The demands placed on him by family life were just as strong as those placed on him by his lover.  His quarrel with Douglas was followed hard upon by an equally draining quarrel with his wife. When Oscar flew off to Paris to escape Bosie, he bailed on a wedding he was supposed to attend.  Constance was furious.  This is when Oscar decided he could not live this double life any more. He refused to see Bosie, arranged for him to be sent away, and for a while he tried to be the “ideal husband” he had seemed to be early in their marriage.

It didn’t last long, of course.

The beginning of the book contained a bit more background on Constance, and especially  on her wardrobe, than my level of interest supported. As the book reached its climax and tragic end, though, it is riveting.  After society had torn the family apart in the name of protecting the nation’s morals by sending Wilde to prison, they did it again with a severe penal system. Prisoners were allowed few visitors and only one letter a month. Friends and family had to compete for available slots. Because of this, Wilde’s well-meaning friends and Constance’s well-meaning advisors could only guess as to Wilde’s true wishes. Each tried to act on his behalf, and at cross purposes.  It would be comic if the consequences were not so tragic.