Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Poetry, Short Stories

205 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1900

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Reviews

[Davida Chazan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of short pieces by the amazing Oscar Wilde runs the gamut from letters to non-fiction essays to pieces of his fiction. My full review is on my blog here. https://tcl-bookreviews.com/2020/12/2...

[emilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of this was incredible, and Oscar Wilde is just iconic in so many ways. Also my reading experience was very good because my copy of this is an ancient clothbound 1915 edition with roughly cut pages, so I guess the materiality of this book definitely influenced my opinion of the texts themselves. Would definitely recommend this, although I'm not sure if this specific 'selected prose' really exists in current editions, as the obscurity of the Goodreads listing suggests.

[Easha Nandyala · Rating 4 out of 5]

funny and clever and smart and shallow

[khyati · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can never go wrong with Oscar Wilde.

[Carly Krewitsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oscar Wilde is a great writer! The Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde contains passages from his short poems, essays, plays, and letters. There is a lot from de Profundis, which was written while Wilde was in prison. Wilde seems to have found Christianity while in prison. I liked that there were two passages from The Canterville Ghost, which is one of my favorite works by Oscar Wilde. Wilde wrote many essays on other authors, in which he would criticize them or praise them. I didn't like that the parts of Salome that were included were written in French. (I don't know French, so I had trouble understanding what was written on the page. I did understand a few words here and there.)

[Vincent Russo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the choice passages of Oscar Wilde's works are presented in this book. Indeed, the best way to get the most out of the passages themselves is to actually read the work in question, but many of the quotes stand very well by themselves.

[Anto ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fue una lectura ligera y sin desperdicio, Oscar Wilde es un excelente autor. Me parece increíble la belleza de su prosa y la vigencia de su obra en la actualidad.
Disfrute mucho más la edición en Inglés que la traducida al Español.

[Emi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note to self: Reread after having a look at all those people and stuffs Wilde snarked at.