Wilde

The Jacob Epstein sculpture that now marks Wilde's grave at Père Lachaise. From the Library of Congress.

In this week's issue of The New Yorker I have an essay on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Back in the nineties, I wrote sporadically on literary topics for the magazine; such work fell away when The Rest Is Noise took over my life, circa 2001. As a former English major, I'm happy to return to the fray.) In 2000 I wrote about Alfred Douglas, Wilde's odious lover. Let's hope that someone somewhere is working on a biography of perhaps the oddest member of the very odd Douglas line: Sholto Douglas, whose random life can be glimpsed in the Times piece below (click to enlarge). Connoisseurs of coincidence will note that the name Sholto appears in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, which was commissioned at the same dinner that elicited Dorian Gray.