Oscar Wilde Society - Publications

NEW PUBLICATION: Death in Genoa by Thomas Wright

The first edition of a new play by the author of Oscar’s Books.

Death in Genoa is an imaginative dramatic reconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s visit to his wife’s grave in Genoa, on 26 February 1899 (a poignant and little-known episode in his life), and of the time he spent in the Ligurian city. The drama is based on fact, but it is a work of fiction.

A ‘Made in Manchester/Dark Smile’ production, the audio play Death in Genoa was uploaded to the website of The Independent newspaper in December 2009 (the week of the 109th anniversary of Wilde’s death) and is still available for free download at the following address:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/free-independent-drama-death-in-genoa-featuring-simon-callow-as-oscar-wilde-1833609.html

In the audio drama Simon Callow plays Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Barnett (The History Boys) is Omero, a young Genoese rent-boy Wilde picks up, and who acts as his guide to the city.

Thomas Wright's unabridged script of the drama is published here (for the audio broadcast an entire scene was cut). The book contains a long preface by the author describing the historical context and composition of the play. It is illustrated with a number of evocative photographs of late nineteenth-century Genoa.

Death in Genoa is available direct from the Society at £8.00 inclusive of post and packing within the UK. Please click here to download a purchase form.

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Oscar Wilde visits his wife's grave in Genoa, a journey of destiny.

By P. C. Wright ("'Keep it Slow'" Bedford UK) 4 Feb 2010

‘This is a fascinating play which explores the complexity of Oscar Wilde. Wilde is not the dandy in the witness box or the scourge of English society with all the usual elaborated dramatics. This is a more human and complex character with children, and a wife he loved ; but still louche and unrepentant. Thomas Wright's play, and Simon Callow's Wilde conjure up a person with heart, shallowness, regret and a foreboding. This is a bitter sweet rite of passage as Wilde knowingly drifts towards his own fate. Absorbing and thought provoking. Excellent.’

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Oscar Wilde: The Women of Homer edited by Thomas Wright and Donald Mead

The first edition of a hitherto unpublished work by Oscar Wilde:

"This book is a wonderful contribution both to Homeric and to Wildean studies".
PETER ACKROYD

"The editors' skilful and sensitive rearrangement of the order of the raw manuscript into five sections has resulted in a remarkably coherent and readable essay. This is a beautifully produced edition of Wilde's earliest surviving prose work, one that is likely to satisfy the editors' hope that 'The Women of Homer' will take its place in Wilde's oeuvre."
JOHN SLOAN from the review in The Wildean No. 34

Oscar Wilde: The Women of Homer, edited by Thomas Wright and Donald Mead, was published by the Oscar Wilde Society on 1st November 2008 in a cloth bound hardback illustrated edition limited to 130 numbered copies .

In 1876 Oscar Wilde, then an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, wrote an article surveying the chapter 'The Women of Homer' from John Addington Symonds's newly published Studies of the Greek Poets (Second Series). The article was both a review of Symonds’s book and a general introduction to the heroines of Homer's epics. Wilde failed to complete the piece, abandoning it after penning 8,500 words.

Wilde's manuscript has survived. Robert Ross seems to have contemplated including it in his Collected Edition of Wilde's works but he never finished the work of editing it.

Wilde's article, 'The Women of Homer', is published here for the very first time. It is his earliest surviving prose work, and probably his first attempt at reviewing. It has been read by only a handful of scholars and Wildeans.

In this book, the typescript of the article which Robert Ross prepared is collated with Wilde's manuscript, and reproduced as a scholarly reference text illustrated by facsimiles of pages of the typescript and manuscript, and photographs. It is accompanied by a reading text, aimed at the general reader, in which Wilde's fragmentary article is re-ordered and fully annotated, and illustrated with designs by John Flaxman .

This charming edition of The Women of Homer is an elegant and intriguing addition to Wilde's oeuvre.

It is available direct from the Society at £30.00 inclusive of post and packing within the UK. Please click here to download a purchase form.

Thomas Wright's Table Talk Oscar Wilde, the first English language collection of Wilde's spoken stories, was published in 2000 by Cassell & Co. Oscar's Books, his biography of Wilde the reader, was published by Chatto & Windus in September 2008. Death in Genoa was published by the Oscar Wilde Society in January 2010.

Donald Mead, the Chairman of the Oscar Wilde Society, is the Editor of The Wildean, A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies.

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REGULAR PUBLICATIONS

The Oscar Wilde Society issues two regular print journals – The Wildean and Intentions - to all its members both in UK and, by airmail, to those overseas.

The Wildean: A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies

To quote Jonathan Fryer in his biography Wilde (Haus Publishing, 2005):

'The Wildean provides both stimulation to Wilde scholars and enlightenment to Oscar enthusiasts.'

The Wildean is published twice a year and contains illustrated articles and correspondence on a wide range of topics relating to Oscar Wilde and his circle. Contributors include many distinguished writers on Wilde. In addition to articles about Wilde’s life and writings, often incorporating the results of new research, important books about Wilde are reviewed as soon as possible after publication.

To quote Professor Pascal Aquien in the notes to his bilingual edition of Un Mari Idéal (GF Flammarion, 2004):

‘The Wildean regularly brings up to date the bibliography of Oscar Wilde.’

A combined Table of Contents for all the issues of The Wildean may be seen by clicking here.

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Here is an outline of the contents of the two most recent issues:

The Wildean No.36 issued in January 2010

ARNOLD T. SCHWAB, in his article ‘Symons, Gray, and Wilde: A Study in Relationships’ gives a fascinating and wide-ranging account of the relations between Wilde and Arthur Symons, and Wilde and John Gray. Wilde’s attitude to Symons at the time he contributed to The Woman’s World was jokingly contemptuous but he was greatly pleased when in 1898 Symons published a generous review of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The article goes on to discuss Symons, John Gray and André Raffalovich, and considers in detail the relationship between Wilde and Gray. Wilde wrote to Bosie Douglas in De Profundis: ‘When I compare my friendship with you to my friendship with such still younger men as John Gray and Pierre Louÿs, I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher life, was with them and such as they.’

HORST SCHROEDER’s latest instalment of his study of Volume IV of the Oxford English Texts Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (which he began in The Wildean 34) scrutinises Josephine Guy’s edition of Pen, Pencil and Poison – A Study in Green, Wilde’s biographical essay on Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Her understanding of the essay is that it is a ‘double portrait’ of Wainewright and Walter Pater and ‘a witty attack on Wilde’s old mentor through a carefully orchestrated series of allusions’. Horst Schroeder says: ‘it is totally unimaginable that this most sensitive of sensitive men would have remained on speaking terms with Wilde, if he had felt himself caricatured in Wilde’s essay’ and goes on to discuss, with illuminating and entertaining additions, corrections and annotations, a number of references in the essay and their treatment in the OET edition.

REBECCA MITCHELL in ‘“Simply a Girl in a Village": A Precedent for Hetty Merton', addresses the relationship between the stories of Hetty Merton in Dorian Gray and Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot's Adam Bede. She suggests that Dorian Gray's brief story of Hetty Merton recalls not only the name of Adam Bede's Hetty Sorrel, but also many of the themes present in Eliot's novel. She considers the parallels between the novels' focus on the tension between external beauty and internal fortitude and suggests that by evoking Eliot's work, Wilde integrates the nuances of her moral equations into his own novel.

NICHOLAS FRANKEL, in ‘Vernon Lee and A. Mary F. Robinson – Two New Sources for Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray’, discovers two sources, undetected by previous editors, that provide an interesting glimpse into Wilde’s reading of the leading women writers of his day. In ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ Wilde described both women as authors of ‘charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance’. Nicholas Frankel traces their influence on Wilde’s novel particularly the central chapter in which Dorian is fascinated by the ‘the awful and beautiful forms of those whom Lust and Blood and Weariness had made monstrous or mad.’

IOANNA PAPAGEORGIOU’s article ‘Oscar Wilde’s Salomé on the Stage in Athens (1908 – 1925) is a most interesting study of a subject which will be unfamiliar to many readers. It examines three major productions of Salomé by Greek actors and directors, explains the factors affecting the choice of the play, and interprets the style of the performances in the wider social and cultural framework of Greece at that time.

The Wildean No. 35 Issued in July 2009

THOMAS WRIGHT’s biography of Wilde the reader, Oscar’s Books, now published in the USA as Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, has been a considerable critical and popular success. That book concludes with Wright’s account of how he bought Wilde’s copy of Swinburne’s Essays and Studies at auction, and how he regarded it as a sort of imprimatur for Oscar’s Books and as a talisman that would help him complete his work. In his article about the Swinburne volume he describes how Wilde marked passages in virtually all the essays, transcribed notes into his commonplace book, borrowed critical ideas and drew stylistic inspiration from it. ‘It offers us a portal into Wilde’s reader’s mind and into his writer’s workshop’.

GARY SCHARNHORST in ‘Oscar Wilde and Julian Hawthorne’ considers the relationship between the two men who sometimes crossed paths in London during the late 1870s. Hawthorne was impressed by the brilliance of his mental quality, and found his talk extraordinary, but ‘something in him repelled and something attracted me to him’. The article examines contradictions in Hawthorne’s recollections and the way in which his respect for Wilde declined after his trials.

HORST SCHROEDER continues the detailed consideration of Volume IV of the Oxford English Texts Complete Works of Oscar Wilde which he began in The Wildean 34. He scrutinises Josephine Guy’s edition of The Truth of Masks, and provides many illuminating additions, corrections and annotations. He regrets that she has not made more extensive use of recently published material to bring her research up to date. In particular he points out that many of Wilde’s references in The Truth of Masks become intelligible only when seen against the background of a book which Wilde owned - J.R. Planché’s Cyclopedia of Costume (1876-79).

MARGARET WHITE in ‘Wilde’s ‘Puritanism’: Hester Worsley and the American Dream’ examines the American character, Hester Worsley, in Wilde’s most serious play, A Woman of No Importance. In it, Wilde reveals his disappointment in English culture and his dream that something better can be built in the new Eden, America.

SANDRA MAYER’s article ‘When Critics Disagree: Sensationalism and Myth-Making in the Reception of Oscar Wilde in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna’ discusses Wilde’s reputation in Vienna where interest in his writings was fuelled by his notoriety but assessment of them encumbered by the ideological implications of his extraordinary career.

NARAIN PRASAD SHUKLA in ‘Stylistic Devices in Oscar Wilde’s Prose’ studies the decorative style and descriptive richness of A House of Pomegranates and The Happy Prince and Other Tales.

S.I. SALAMENSKI in ‘Sexing Speech: Wilde Talk in Julia Constance Fletcher’s Mirage and Rhoda Broughton’s Second Thoughts considers the talk of Davenant and Chaloner, the flamboyant, charismatic and garrulous but emasculate Wilde-like aesthetes in these two novels by his contemporaries.

MICHAEL SEENEY reviews Nicholas Frankel’s book Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s commending it as a guide to the experimental book making of the period where visionary publishers and extraordinary illustrators and designers produced some of the most exquisite books the literary world has seen.

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The Wildean: A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies is a publication of permanent interest and back copies of previous issues are available.

To quote Professor Joseph Bristow,

'The Wildean is brimful of good things'.

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Intentions

The Society’s programme of forthcoming events, with booking forms, is published in Intentions, a Journal/Newsletter which is issued to all members about six times a year.
v Intentions, edited by Michael Seeney, is fully illustrated in colour and also gives information about public performances of Wilde plays, other theatrical occasions and films. In each issue there is a detailed survey of newly published books of Wildean interest, with publishing details, synopses and comment.

Intentions is also a journal of record for Society events. To take just a few examples:

At recent Birthday Dinners the Society has enjoyed a talk by Simon Wilson on Jacob Epstein’s Wilde monument in Père Lachaise, and Oliver Parker’s rare and generous insight into the film-making process including the problems of bringing Dorian Gray to the screen. Neil McKenna (author of The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde) gave a talk on ‘Edward Shelley: A Boy of Some Importance’ and Rick Gekoski an authoritative and very entertaining lesson in how to form a book collection, including the formation and disposal of the John Simpson Collection.

At recent Society lunches Neil McKenna talked about 'Fanny and Stella' (Boulton and Park); Thomas Wright and Simon Scardifield presented 'Oscar's Books' ; Don Mead and Thomas Wright presented 'Oscar Wilde: The Women of Homer'; and Gyles Brandreth gave some background to his series of detective stories featuring Wilde; and Joy Melville spoke on Ellen Terry.
v Intentions records the Society’s visits including those to Paris for the commemoration by Société Oscar Wilde en France of Wilde’s re-interment at Père Lachaise , and to Reading Gaol (copiously illustrated with contemporary and archive photographs and drawings) and

Intentions publishes interesting and unusual items culled from sometimes obscure sources. Recent issues contain an article by Constance Wilde in The Young Woman on 'How to Decorate a House'; a review by Willie Wilde of a performance of 'Helena in Troas'; and an article in Harper's Weekly in January 1882 about Wilde 'Our Aesthetic Visitor'.

Intentions regularly reproduces advertisements, rare trade cards and other commercially produced items connected with Oscar Wilde and his works.

Occasional publications

Special publications for members include Don Mead's guides prepared for the Society visits to places associated with Wilde. Oscar Wilde in Paris was recently reissued on the occasion of the Society’s participation in the commemoration of the re-interment of Wilde’s remains at Père Lachaise organised by Société Oscar Wilde en France. Oscar Wilde in Dublin, and Oscar Wilde in Dieppe and Berneval were also updated for successive visits. The various sites are identified in the notes, so that the booklets may also be of use to the unaccompanied visitor.