Will the real Constance Wilde please stand up?

I've been getting to work (finally!) on the new edition of The Coward Does it with a Kiss. It's a bit of a process for a technophobe like me, negotiating the mysteries of the KDP template and conquering my fear of the toolbar, learning how to do things like footnotes and page breaks all on my own (I'm determined to do this one without help from tech-savvy friends) – but it's fun to rediscover the Constance Wilde that I inhabited back in 1989, writing letters to her estranged husband Oscar from her exile in Italy and re-reading her old diaries.

What strikes me about my version of Constance is how her shattered sense of identity, after having played the part of Mrs Oscar for so long, leads her to doubt, contradict and question herself repeatedly as she searches her diaries, her heart and her conscience for the truth about her relationship with her disgraced husband. How well did she really know him? How soon did she begin to suspect that he preferred boys to women? How much of her role as a supportive wife was play-acting? It is not Oscar's behaviour that puzzles her, she insists, but her own; contrary to popular expectation, 'I did and still do understand you, Oscar … It is myself, myself I do not understand.'

At once point she relives the occasion, a few months after the birth of their second son Vyvyan, when Oscar finally announced that the sexual side of their marriage was over. She recalls the excuse he gave - that he'd suffered a recurrence of an STD contracted during his student days (the debate about whether or not this disease was syphilis, and whether it was this that ultimately killed him as Richard Ellmann alleges in his 1987 biography, still rages). She re-reads her diary entries expressing outrage at being thus rejected, and for a reason that she does not believe for a minute; speculating as to who has taken her place in her husbands' affections; and determining never to show how much he has hurt her but to rise above her circumstances and find new outlets for her creativity and passion.
'Would you be surprised, Oscar, to read all this?' she wonders; adding 'But perhaps you would be even more surprised to hear that it is all lies!'
The truth, she now reveals, was that she had already lost all desire, and a great deal of respect, for Oscar following his reaction to her two pregnancies, and felt that it should have been her prerogative, not his, to withdraw sexual services.
'Let it be recorded now, Oscar, that you gave me the freedom I would have chosen, but that I would gladly have flung it back in your face, and redoubled my pretence of ardour, so great was my anger at having no choice in the matter.'

Such self-contradiction as she see-saws between conflicting emotions continues throughout the narrative as Constance recalls how, whilst trying to establish a career in her own right by immersing herself in women's politics, lecturing on the history of fashion and writing and publishing children's stories, she was alternately charmed and repulsed by Oscar's fawning young men, alternately aware of and ignorant of his clandestine affairs, alternately understanding of his homosexuality and outraged at his reckless disregard for its effect upon herself.
'I really did begin to rise on my wings', she reminiscences; 'How long would they have borne me up, how high might I have soared, had 'Apollo' (ie Lord Alfred Douglas) not crossed my path with his fiery chariot and reduced them to feathers and wax?'

It's interesting to me to remember that The Coward was written at a time when I was struggling with my own sense of identity, both as regards sexuality and as a new mother. In many of Constance's soliloquys I see echoes of my own doubt, guilt and insecurity of thirty-odd years ago. Is this why I was able to inhabit her so easily? And did it result in a vivid, credible picture of what she might have been thinking, feeling and wanting to say during the last few months of her life, or have I merely created a Constance in my own image, far divorced from what the real woman who now signed herself 'C.M. Holland' would have thought, felt and said?

In the years since The Coward's publication courtesy of the Gay Men's Press back in 1990, more research has been done into Constance Wilde's life, more of her letters have been made public, and more has come to light about the reason for her early death in 1998 at the age of only thirty-nine (it is now thought she was suffering from MS, a recognised but poorly understood condition back in the late nineteenth century – see my April blog 'What Killed Constance Wilde 120 years ago?') As I struggle with the dilemma of how much, if any, of this information to include in this new edition, I'm pleasantly surprised to discover that the Constance I encounter in re-reading Franny Moyle's 2011 biography Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde, and in Lexi Wolfe's 2016 one-woman play 'Mrs Oscar Wilde' (included in her book Women Of Forgotten Importance: Three Stories) does seem to me to be of a piece with 'my' Constance, with the same youthful bravado gradually replaced by the same confusion, self-doubt and disillusionment. I hope that between us, we have done her credit and succeeded in presenting a complex, misunderstood and greatly underestimated character as a 'woman of some importance' in her own right.