This book is a haunting and beautiful biography of the don of the Aesthetic Movement. It traces his life from his early days as the son of a prominent physician father and an eccentric socialite mother (Sperenza) to his competition with Bram Stoker for the hand of Frances Balcombe, to his early homosexual experiments and final death amod disgrace and anonymity in the exile of France.

Richard Ellmann wields his pen with alacrity, grace, and an intense sympathy for his subject that may leave you in tears. A work of astonishing beauty

This still remains for many the gold standard and first reference for any study of Wilde. I used it as a reference book, and didn't read it cover to cover, but have read or will read most of it. It's particularly interesting for its early portrait of Wilde as a student, although the details grow a bit more sketchy about his later life, particularly after he became more involved with Douglas. I'd highly recommend this to be read in conjunction with Neil McKenna's more recent The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. McKenna brings to light the fact that Wilde was in relationships with men long before Wilde met Robbie Ross, and much of his sexual life, while Ellmann's analysis of Wilde's major works, as well as some hilarious behind-the-scenes anecdotes about Wilde's relationships with other authors, artists, actors, and famous figures fully fleshes out the portrait of this fascinating man. Still, given Wilde's complexity, always remember that this is a great launching pad, and studying Wilde (despite his relatively short life) is a lifelong labor.

this is one of my dearest treasures for the year 2008.what i have is actually a hardcover, picked at my 'used books' store for the price of my normal dinner at my favourite 'fast foods'. i couldnt believe it!!

it's a great story about a great person.

here is the most important thing about it: it is written with a subjective, condemning tone. and i felt the author should have surpassed the shadows of his subject's sexuality and other personality weaknesses, to simply objectively tell us the story!!!

Don't miss this wonderful book. What a fascinating character - very well told.

For what it's worth, my favorite Oscar Wilde quote: "The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about."

What a hoot!

O, Oscar, without you and the other brave LGBT men and women I would be sad and lonely and hidden. But I am proud instead. thank you, Oscar. thank you so much. i hope you see from heaven our parades in which we kiss without hiding anymore. thank you so much.

I feel safe in saying I know more about Oscar Wilde after having read this book.

As he is the chronicler of many of the great Irish writers, Richard Ellman, he provides the life and times of The Victorian Age’s sharpest wit, Oscar Wilde…Though one of the most encompassing biographies, I’ve ever read, this aesthetic deviant just seemed pathetic, not witty and charming…I like him even less than I did when I read “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde is an incredible piece of scholarship. Wilde lived from 1854 to 1900. In some ways he led a very modern life - he travelled extensively and revelled in London’s nightlife - but it’s a time before cars and planes were invented; electricity was just being introduced in London, so it’s a long time ago. Yet despite this great chasm of time, Ellman has somehow cobbled together a record of seemingly everything Wilde ever did and every conversation Wilde ever had. I exaggerate, but the level of detail is mind boggling: there are 31 pages of footnotes, and 38 pages of index references in this 648 page tome. Wilde and his friends and associates, which there are hundreds, must have been obsessive letter writers and careful antiquarians. This results in a closeness to the inner workings of this ‘great’ man that is both unusually rare and uncommonly revealing. Most people are complex if you scratch beneath the surface; to protect ourselves from divulging our weaknesses and insecurities we put up defences and barriers; so only our most intimate friends and family see the true us. That is what makes this biography so remarkable: we get an in-depth view of Wilde’s many contradictions and his dangerously unfiltered lifestyle. He was clearly deeply conflicted; my initial reaction to him was equally complicated and confused. For large stretches of the book I thought Wilde was loathsome: pompous, arrogant, shallow, vain, insincere, and lazy. But he was also principled, very well read, occasionally quite driven and resilient, and famously witty: although much of his wit seems based on the maxim of ‘never meaning anything he says’ or ‘saying anything he means’, which is ultimately quite formulaic. He was also an extremely poor judge of character, which was his downfall, becoming embroiled in a torrid public love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, a man with no obvious redeeming qualities other than youth. Douglas, or Bosie as he was known, was spoilt, vapid, charmless, sponging, and lacking in depth, with a disapproving and very powerful father Lord Queensbury, who was hell bent on bringing Wilde down for ‘corrupting’ his son. Homosexual acts, despite their prevalence in certain parts of English society, were illegal at the time; Wilde and Douglas’s cavalier way of life results in two years of prison for Wilde, which he does with ruinous implications for his health and well being. When released Wilde escapes to France where he spends his remaining years ostracized from the general public, alone and penniless. It’s a very sad ending, which inspired a reaction in me not of comeuppance, but of pity, both for Wilde’s unfair persecution for loving a man, but also for the premature snuffing out of this very bright light. Wilde lived for companionship and conversation and the good life (which required money he did not have). To be deprived of all these things in his last days seems a rather cruel and inhumane punishment.

This book is NOT for someone who wants a thorough, narrative biography....its a detailed, sometimes daily account of a very flawed man with his various philosophies, contradictions and selfishness included.
Its perfect for an English major or Wilde enthusiast, but at times reads as cites or quotes pieced together.
The book left me less enamored of Wilde and some of the author's more positive summaries of Wildest behavior are not supported in the book. I can tell it took 20 years to research and write and I learned a lot but ultimately it left me sad as he brought most of his demise in himself and was unkind and combative to those closest to him.

Ellmann's biography is painstaking research into the life and times of Oscar Wilde. He draws on letters and readings and contemporary accounts of Wilde to build his life.

Wilde was precocious and insecure and wildy intelligent, as well as loving and romantic and sometimes, petulant.

I'd say this is only for die-hard fans, as it's a hard slog through some of the details.

Wilde at his wildest and mildest

After reading this book, I cannot help but review Oscar Wilde, the man and his life, as if it were a work of art in itself, as much as I can this biography of Wilde as depicted by Richard Ellmann. Wilde, as much as any historical figure, certainly as much as any creative figure, speaks loudly as an artifact of the age he embodied and from which he was consumed and discarded and as a creative figure whose own life was arguably a greater work of art than anything he ever wrote or said.

Before addressing Wilde, let’s evaluate Ellman’s book on its own merits. He presents everything you ever wanted to know about Oscar Wilde and then some. Admittedly, the voluminous number of acquaintances, companions and foes whose paths crossed with Wilde’s is overwhelming and it requires a monumental juggling act to keep track of all the players and how they intersect with each other and revolve around Wilde, the sun of this biographical solar system. Ellmann does an admirable job of this, although I was lost quite frequently and had to backtrack to find the first mention of an individual to identify the original relation to Wilde and draw a line in my mind between an individual once kindly disposed toward him and the person that ostracized and avoided him during and after his disgrace.

One might view the ordeal and persecution of Wilde in the 19th century and conclude that he could live very openly and comfortably in the 21st century where gay and bisexual characters appear daily in all forms of media. That would seem to be an erroneous interpretation when one sees that Wilde was inextricably linked to the time and culture in which he lived. He was a product of Victorian England and he, by design as well as circumstance, paid the price for bringing an aspect of human sexuality and behavior to the unavoidable attention of a society that dared not think of, much less, speak the name of the abomination which Wilde represented to them.

Wilde’s creativity, imagination and wit were all intertwined with his identity as provocateur, even as he sought the favor of respectable society. He felt compelled to seek out the ‘nameless’ side of human nature, specifically in a mutually destructive relationship with a powder keg of a young man, Lord Alfred Douglas. At the same time in which Oscar was fulfilling his authentic identity, that vehicle for his liberation was also the route to his undoing and downfall from the heights of success. Wilde could probably have saved himself from prison by following the advice of his long-suffering but tolerant wife Constance and his loyal friend Robbie Ross and living in exile in another country. However, he could not run. Staying and fighting, even if it led to prison was in his constitution and had been instilled in him by his very litigious mother.

Ellmann repeatedly refers to Wilde as a kind and considerate man and in many respects this is true. He was generous even when he was in dire financial straits himself and he lavished gifts and compliments in purple prose as if he possessed an endless supply of both. It appears to me, however, that his greatest sin, more so than any of his ‘indecent’ activities, was his neglect of his wife and children, the innocent victims of Oscar’s hedonistic quest for self-fulfillment.

Utimately, Oscar Wilde’s greatest creation was ‘Oscar Wilde’, a work of art that overshadows even his greatest prose work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as his greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest. It perhaps surprised him as much as anyone else that the play of his life that he originally conceived as a comedy was quickly transformed in its final act into tragedy.

A wonderful biography of Wilde's life and everything that was happening to him while he wrote his many great works, like The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as his short stories, like my favorite, The Happy Prince. I knew some facts surrounding his arrest and imprisonment before reading this but didn't know a lot, like how it started with his libel suit against his lover's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, so that was of particular interest, as was Wilde's trip to the United States. His life was both charmed and tragic, and the book captures all of it. HIGHLY recommend!