Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris cover art

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris

By: Oscar Wilde
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Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who "knew" the subject more or less intimately, and the more objective or scholarly accounts produced by later generations.

In the case of Wilde, as presented to us by Frank Harris, we are in a way doubly estranged from the subject. We meet with Oscar the charismatic talker, whose tone of voice can never be reproduced – even if a more scrupulous biographer had set down his words accurately – and we are perhaps already aware of him as Wilde the self-destructive celebrity who uneasily fills the place of the premier gay icon and martyr in our contemporary view.

Neither of these images will do. We need to read as many accounts as possible. Harris, though himself a self-advertising literary and sexual buccaneer, takes a wincingly representative view of Wilde’s homophile activity: for him it is a patrician excrescence, the abominable vice of the few, contracted at English boarding schools – though thankfully “not infectious” as far as he himself is concerned.

What a long road we have to travel to arrive at the essentially gay man of today! But there are many shortcuts to take us back to where we came from… (Summary by Martin Geeson)Public Domain Art
Episodes
  • XXIII. His Judgments of Writers and of Women

    XXIII. His Judgments of Writers and of Women
    Jun 2 2026
    35 mins
  • XXV. The Last Hope Lost

    XXV. The Last Hope Lost
    Jun 2 2026
    40 mins
  • XVI. Escape Rejected: The Second Trial and Sentence

    XVI. Escape Rejected: The Second Trial and Sentence
    Jun 2 2026
    52 mins
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