Selected Product:
| The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
Paperback
Edition: Revised
Author: Neil McKenna
Publisher: Basic Books
Release Date: 2006-11-06
ISBN-10: 0465044395
ISBN-13: 9780465044399
List Price: $18.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Oscar Wilde
ISBN-10: 0394759842
ISBN-13: 9780394759845
List Price:$22.00
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays
ISBN-10: 006096393X
ISBN-13: 9780060963934
List Price:$24.95
The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
ISBN-10: 000715805X
ISBN-13: 9780007158058
List Price:$14.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
In The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, Neil McKenna provides stunning new insight into the tumultuous sexual and psychological worlds of this brilliant and tormented figure. McKenna charts Wilde’s astonishing odyssey through London’s sexual underworld, and provides explosive new evidence of the political machinations behind Wilde’s trials for sodomy. Dazzlingly written and meticulously researched, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde offers a vividly original portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.
A page turner!
| Customer Rating: | I admit that I knew very little of Oscar Wilde when I chose this particular book, at random. What an excellent choice for a novice as well as a Wilde devotee! Not only did I appreciate the tragic love story of Oscar, Constance and Bosie, but I also gained an insight into Victorian mores and political machinations. We apparently can't claim the corner on the market of corrupt zealots.
If you haven't read Mr. McKenna's work, you must. In the biography arena, this book is beyond the realm. |
Everything you wanted to know....
| Customer Rating:  | McKenna has carved his own niche among the Wilde biographies by concentrating on Oscar's homosexuality (too often marginalized or avoided by other writers), with emphasis on his long relationship with Bosie; McKenna considers theirs a great love affair, but it appears to have been something along the lines of codependency. It's quite remarkable how much detail is known about Oscar's antics through letters, journals and books, maybe too much, since this long read is at times a bit tedious as we move through one young man after another. McKenna has a couple of annoying habits as a writer -- all the young men couldn't have been quite as "breathtakingly" attractive as described, he makes a lot of suppositions about what someone must have thought, or might have done, and he's a bit melodramatic with the "but he would find out all too soon" chapter endings.
But these are quibbles. The book is important is several ways. Above all, it portrays Wilde as one of a group of early advocates of gay rights, a fervent believer that society and the law should treat homosexuals with equality and respect. It also provides a fascinating "decoding" of Wilde's most famous works by explaining the double, ie. homosexual, meaning of words, phrases and behavior on the part of his characters, who were often based on real people. The book paints a vivid picture of the seamy side of London's "Uranian" underground of rent boys, petty thieves and blackmailers and the "respectable" men who took their pleasure there. And it delves into his marriage, the ill-fated consequence of having to protect his reputation from the circling vultures.
Wilde is a fascinating, maddening subject, so sure of his own superiority that he considered himself above the law and the strictures of society, making him ultimately the instrument of his own self-destruction. This book will be of interest primarily to Wilde junkies and people interested in the sexual aspect of his life, but it should be read in conjunction with other bios, lest one get the impression that the great man did little but go at it like a rabbit. |
A controversial walk on the Wilde side.
| Customer Rating: | "I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china," Oscar Wilde confessed while he was a student at Oxford (p. 14).
For anyone who has visited his lipstick-kissed tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Wilde's "secret life" is really no secret. Wilde (1854-1900) was primarily an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet, known for his brazen wit ("Little boys should be obscene and not heard," p. 257), which made him one of the greatest celebrities of late Victorian London. Following Wilde's death, his friend, Frank Harris, wrote a biography, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, which was followed by H. Montgomery Hyde's 1975 biography, Oscar Wilde: A Biography, and more recently Richard Ellmann's 1987 meticulous work, Oscar Wilde. Whereas these earlier, excellent biographies focused primarily on Wilde's literary achievements and dealt with his sexuality only in passing, Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde examines Wilde's sexuality and sexual behavior in detail--and at times, in graphic detail.
Most biographers concur that Wilde was introduced to homosexuality in 1885, but McKenna speculates--in charting Wilde's "journey" to find his true sexual self (p. xi)--Wilde was first aware of his homosexuality much earlier when he kissed another boy at age 16. After his arrival at Oxford in 1874, Wilde experienced passionate, romantic feelings for Greek beauty (i.e., cultivated, youthful, "fair," "slim" choirboys) (pp. 6-7), but was drawn sexually towards rougher boys. Following his visit to America in 1882, Wilde boasted, "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips." In his struggle against his sexual feelings for young men, Wilde attempted to "cure" his sexuality in 1884 by marrying Constance Lloyd (the daughter of Queen's Counsel Horace Lloyd) and by fathering two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). But he continued to have regular sexual relationships with Robert Baldwin Ross, Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), and random teenage boys, whom he would meet in bars or brothels, culminating in his May, 1895 conviction and two-year imprisonment for "gross indecency." Later, after remarking, "my wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go" (p. 463), Wilde died in Paris, knowing that "he was a martyr in an epic struggle for the freedom of men to love men" (p. 465).
Drawn from interviews, letters, memoirs, journals, and Wilde's own writings--although McKenna's controversial but highly readable biography has been criticised for being too speculative, it nevertheless succeeds in bringing Wilde to life as a literary genius, a dandy, a pagan, an "extreme aesthete" who attempted to live his life by burning hard like a gemlike flame (p. 13), and as a gay Victorian outcast.
G. Merritt |
New Depths of Oscar Wilde's Life
| Customer Rating: | See the other side of famous author Oscar Wilde with this biography. You'll gain new insight and perspective on his life.
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A magical read
| Customer Rating: | I bought this book after reading a rave reviews in The Washington Post.
It is everything that it promised to be: brave, fresh, exciting, and
scrupulously researched. I have read most other biographies of Oscar
over the years and really thought that there was little left to say.
McKenna's biography has proved me wrong by proving not a wealth of new
and exciting material, but also a wealth of new insights and
interpretations. I cannot recommend this book too highly - it is a
beautiful and magical read. At the best part of 600 pages, it's a long
book, but for me it wasn't long enough. Incidentally, I don't
understand the comments of the latest reviewer about footnotes. In my
US hardback edition there are nearly 60 pages of notes which
scrupulously source every quote. |
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