Books like Oscar Wilde

Wilde had to live his life twice over, first in slow motion, then at top speed. During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat. Richard Ellmann’s superlative bio ranks alongside the finest in the genre, with his earlier James Joyce volume already firmly in the pantheon. From Wilde’s unhumble beginnings as the son of two reputable writers, to his college days in the thrall of Ruskin and Pater, to his flowerings as a poet and spokesman for aestheticism, Ellmann presents the working Wilde, a complex contrarian and sneak-tongued snark, as he slowly becomes Wilde the Myth and Wilde the Wit. Parodied and pilloried since he first dared to lecture in knee-breeches, Wilde was always swatting enemies away and poking their hypocrarses, and as his career picked up traction, the vultures suppurated on the sidelines until the blood-axe dropped on the sweaty mattress of boneheaded bastard Bosie. Ellmann writes powerfully about Wilde’s trial and incarceration. The particularity of detail is breathtaking and presented always as a coherent, flowing and utterly captivating narrative, and when Wilde emerges from Reading into the beautiful and disgusting world, into a life of humiliation, penury, skin problems, loneliness, and separation in exile, you would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the preposterous imbecilities of the society Wilde was spoofing. The harsh brainless stupidity of Victorian England collapsed, and Wilde is remembered rightly as an avatar for truth, kindness, and zingy one-liners for every occasion. This fabulously exhaustive and definitive bio has the last word on Wilde, and since no one is ever likely to top it, is essential reading for all Oscarites.