I started this book several years ago, reading a chapter here and there. I had it on the kitchen table for a fallback if I were eating lunch and had nothing else to read. It was moderately interesting but over my head with literary references and analysis. I did enjoy learning more about an author I became fascinated with after reading the fabulous Picture of Dorian Gray. I never thought I’d finish this richly detailed 589-page biography and had resigned myself to having it on the kitchen table for the rest of my life. And then . . . it ramped up with Wilde’s lawsuit against his lover’s father. Wilde accused him of libel for constantly trashing Wilde in public. Wilde, who carried on with the lawsuit to indulge his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, lost, and Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, immediately brought his own suit against Wilde for indecency/sodomy. The tale becomes a real page-turner now. Wilde is convicted, totally disgraced, and Ellman spares none of the juicy details. Or the horrors of a Victorian prison for this renowned 19th century playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet accustomed to living in luxury. Overall, the immensely talented Wilde is presented warts and all. It’s a great tragedy he was treated so badly at the end of his life. A sad time for homosexuals. Ellman makes it clear Wilde, 16 years older, was good to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, while Douglas was less than kind to him, especially at the end when Douglas had received his inheritance and still didn’t help or care for Wilde, who lost everything carrying forth a lawsuit instigated by Douglas. Wilde had spent extravagantly on Douglas and cared for him when he was sick. None of that was reciprocated.

Very interesting and very dense. Ellmann detailed Wilde's life incredibly well, although I disagree with his claim regarding syphilis, as it seems unfounded and is fairly contested.

This book of exhaustive research concerning Wilde’s life is a pleasure to read from his family history to his imprisonment years later and his resulting exile in France. Prior to reading this book, I had always had the impression that Oscar Wilde’s life (except for prison) was one wild ride (pardon the pun). And in some ways it was. He, even after experiencing financial success, was always in want of money, primarily because he was such a spendthrift, spending or giving away money he honestly didn’t have. He cared not about what people thought of his extravagant ideas, his extravagant living. Yet Wilde faced great public disapproval of how he lived his life. His only friends were other homosexual men or those liberal enough to accept him. His downfall came in the package of one man, Lord Alfred Douglas, a much younger man, an aristocrat who both loved and used Wilde. If Wilde had never met him, he might have met his match with some other party, but I doubt it. The latter part of Wilde’s sad life was battling Douglas’s father in court. Lord Percy Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, managed to have Wilde sent to prison for two years because he didn’t want Wilde near his son. Wilde did his prison time, and it broke him, both physically and mentally. He never wrote anything substantial again, was always begging others for money, and suffered physical ailments that eventually brought on his premature death at forty-six. Ellmann’s distinguished book, more than thirty years old now, does great justice to the life of an extraordinary writer who lived, until he could no longer bear the speed of light, way ahead of his time.

Despite ‘Dorian’ being one of my favourite novels, I had never read a biography of Wilde and picking this up for a mere £1 and my rule of ‘buy it, read it’ meant the time had arrived. With one hundred and seventy-five other reviews, what will mine add to this?

Of course, not much. Surely it is all one wants to know of the facts of his life; his flirtation with Catholicism, the feud with Whistler, that trial and all the major works. Its 600 pages and at times it feels it.

I didn’t know that Wilde was so likeable and generous to his pals, which is nice and, of course, with 20:20 21st century hindsight he was appallingly treated by many of those same so called pals in later life for which I feel great sympathy. But, it is hard for me to come away from this book feeling any great overall sympathy for him as was in some very important respects a fool. The staggering sums of money earned and subsequently spent like water, even allowing for his generosity, should have earned him some insulation for later life - it didn’t. The ultimate belief in his own hype when he achieved popular acclaim - always a bad move. His association with Bosie who appears to be an utter asshole of the highest order - say no more. The arrogance that rent-boys would not be seen as ‘victims’, not so 'sensitive' after all. Knowing that homosexuality was illegal and the seeming belief that his social position would somehow protect him, despite warnings from friends telling him to leave the country, foolishness at best, or arrogance again.

None of this diminishes my admiration for his writing.

Despite Ellmann putting him in a most sympathetic light, Wilde still comes from a privileged background moving in a hypocritical societal structure built upon that privilege and comes a cropper when he runs into another nastier nutcase (Queensbury) who hates him. Quelle surprise!

The book has a few other issues for me. It would have been good if Ellmann had given a bit more detail on some of the characters involved. I think I am pretty well versed in the artistic/literary life of the period but there were many names I did not recognise or could have been contextualised more fully.

There is also the issue of ‘that’ photo of ‘Wilde’ in drag playing Salome which has been definitely proven to actually be the Hungarian soprano Alice Guszalewicz. Hopefully it does not appear in later editions of the book. Such whopping (full page) mistakes undermine the scholarly credentials of the book.

Overall, although I found it interesting (and extremely well written) I doubt I will ever re-read it again. This is because I didn’t come away from it thinking that I would find it a useful book to cross reference with other personages of the period, Beardsley and Smithers for example. But I also imagine if you are going to read a bumper Wilde biography it would seem to take some beating.

Published in 1987 the year that Ellmann died, this is very much an acedemic biography of Wilde, and the writing is very much in that style. This is not to say that it is dry, but if you are looking for a biography that will be in the manner of Wilde with quips galore, look elsewhere. The wit is well represented but it is not the sole focus.
Ellmann is clearly a fan of Wilde and the book has a slight bias in that Wilde is seldom criticised, and his role as husband and father is presented as being prefuntionary at best, and there is no criticism.
At the conclusion of the book you can't help but think what might have been, as well as thinking what a horrid little persoon Bosie Douglas was!
For true devotees only.

To my mind simply the greatest biography ever written. An incredible life but summed up magisterially, evoked poetically, and understood humanely. It is not perhaps the easiest read but my god this is a book for the ages.

I've loved Oscar Wilde ever since I first encountered him as a teenager and have read through his complete works numerous times. And I'm also a great admirer of Ellmann's biography on Joyce -- arguably one of the greatest literary biographies ever published. So consider my great surprise to learn how wildly arrogant and assumptive Ellmann is towards one of the greatest wits in the English language! The underrated literary scholar N. John Hunt has already addressed Ellmann's preposterous claim that Max Beerbohm was an accessory to Wilde's arrest. But that's just one of many whoppers in this surprisingly inexacting text. At one point, Ellmann confesses that his claims of Wilde having syphilis wouldn't stand up in a court of law. So, uh, why bring it up then if you know it's not a slam dunk? His hubris is quite evident when he adds a footnote to a court transcript claiming that the reporter failed to capture Wilde's speech as HE would have perceived it.

Most importantly, Ellmann doesn't like Wilde all that much. He shits on THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and has little patience for any Wilde play outside of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. And Ellmann's distaste for Wilde means that Wilde's great work, DE PROFUNDI, is misread as "largely a love letter." He doesn't seem to understand that Wilde wrote this WHILE serving hard labor in prison. Ellmann is also so clueless that he genuinely believed that drink was what killed Wilde at a premature age rather than, oh say, a dandy being forced to exert his energies in prison. In fact, he's strangely condemnatory of Wilde's homosexuality. Yes, Ellmann wrote this in 1984 -- a time that was nowhere nearly as enlightened for LGBTQIA rights as the present. But one would think that even a biographer back then would have more sympathy for his subject.

But the impetuous claims in Ellmann's Wilde biography now lead me to wonder how many of the highly specific parallels between Joyce's life and his work were stumbled upon by accident (or perhaps Ellmann didn't come up with these at all, but someone smarter than him did). This is such a weirdly tendentious and outright erroneous volume, particularly compared to the other one, that I'm left wondering if we have given Richard Ellmann too much of a fair pass.

It's still worth reading for some of the source material, but this volume is often ridiculous in its claims.

A meticulously researched book, a true lover of Wilde. A hard read at times because it seems that you must be very familiar with Wilde's work, even more obscure pieces, and his contemporaries. But he writes about the tragedy of Wilde's unjust imprisonment with great sensitivity.

There's only one thing better than having one's life talked about and that is having it written about by someone as talented as Richard Ellmann. First-rate literary biography (one of my favourite genres) as adjudged by the fact that we end it not only with understanding of the subject but considerable empathy with him.

"Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success."

All I can say is that is was a painful, horrible, heartbreaking thing. I wept and will forever weep for what was done to him.

I'm grateful for Oscar's magnificent book, his clever essays, his unforgettable letters, his witty theatre plays, and his wonderful poetry.

I bought this copy in a cosy secondhand bookstore in Dublin. What a lucky find. I will be turning Oscar's favourite books and requested prison reading material into a project and cross them off my reading list as the years pass.

"Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so."

That was a beast of a book!

I admit, I don’t read many biographies. Mostly because they are either written in the driest and most "fact-based" monotonous way possible or because they are filled with over exaggerations and embellishments to make the object of the work more interesting.

Well, good for Richard Ellmann that Oscar Wilde didn’t need any of those.

Ellmann writes: "He belongs to our world more than to Victoria’s." and I think that fits perfectly for Wilde, who was in many ways a man out of his time.

His writing based aesthetics, his demeanor flamboyant and extravagant, his lifestyle scandalous and his views on the world odd and profound at the same time.

Would Wilde life in our times he would be overly active on Twitter, make the most obscure Stories on Instagram and run his own Podcast about everything and nothing, while spending his free time constructing obscure quizzes for Buzzfeed.

He would be praised one week and cancelled the other in a never-ending rollercoaster ride. And he would probably love every minute of it.

Ellmann wrote this biography with clearly a huge amount of research, but also with passion, compassion and understanding. It is fact-based, but never dry. It perfectly captures the wild life of Wilde (bad pun fully intended), chronicles his highs and lows, gives insights into his writing and paints a perfect picture of Victorian England and its society.

No, I don’t read many biographies, but I‘m glad I‘ve read this one.

First, no one, so far, has been able to match the rigorous process of finding every letter, ever card sent, every saved letter from Oscar's friends---as Richard Ellmann.

Don't read the end, if you don't want to be sad. In some ways, OW was like Mozart. The both died penniless with mind-alternating liquor or opium in their systems.