Oscar Wilde's biography

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He is the son of an internationally renowned Irish surgeon. His mother, Jane Francesa Elgee, was a poet full of nationalist fervour, who in the 1840s supported the Irish cause against England. After classical studies at Trinity College in Dublin, where he already showed a strong personality and distinguished himself from other students by the extravagance of his clothes, Oscar Wilde was admitted to Oxford University. He has as a professor John Ruskin, one of the spokesmen of a cultural movement that believes that art should only be the search for beauty, without any moral or social preoccupation. Oscar Wilde is a brilliant and distinguished student. He has long hair, wears lavaliere ties and adorns the buttonholes of his suits with a carnation, a lily or a chrysanthemum.

A subtle and eccentric spirit, a dandy of rare elegance, his celebrity became great in London's cultural and aristocratic circles, which welcomed his first Poems (1881) with delight. He quickly became one of the theorists of "art for art's sake", and the leader of the "aesthetes". He was thus invited to give a series of lectures in the United States on aesthetics.

Back in Europe, he settled in Paris, where he wrote two plays (La Duchesse de Padoue, 1883), Véra ou les Nihilistes, 1883). He met the main French writers of the time: Verlaine, Mallarmé, Zola, Daudet, and Hugo. Back in London (1884), he married one of his admirers, Constance Lloyd. They will have two children. As editor-in-chief of The Woman's World magazine from 1887 to 1889, he showed his talents as a pamphleteer and his art of paradox. He also worked as an advocate for the feminist cause.

For his children, he organized costume balls and wrote fairy tales (The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888). He also published short stories (The Crime of Lord Arthur Saville and Other Stories, 1891), an essay (Intentions, 1891) and also his only novel (The Portrait of Dorian Gray, 1891). This novel earned him great notoriety, but the English public, shocked, reproached him for the immorality of certain characters.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde decided to sue the Marquis of Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglas, his lover, for defamation. This lawsuit goes badly wrong. In the end, it was the Marquis of Queensberry who took the case to court, accusing Wilde of perverting his son. Oscar Wilde was sentenced for the crime of homosexuality to two years hard labour on May 27, 1895. He will serve this sentence in the very repressive Reading prison in the south of England. He was released from prison on May 19, 1897, and went into exile in France, at Berneval, near Dieppe. He is a broken and ruined man. He takes the name Sebastian Melmoth as his alias. In 1898, he publishes the ballad of the jail of Reading, a moving testimony about his pain as a prisoner. He dies in Paris in 1900 in misery and loneliness.

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