Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde stands as one of the most distinctive voices of the late 19th century, with works spanning poetry, criticism, fiction and drama. Renowned for his wit and flamboyant public persona, he became one of the defining literary figures of the fin de siècle.

Born in Dublin in 1854, Wilde went on to study at Dublin's Trinity College and then Oxford University. After graduating, he moved to London where he soon became known for his writing, which explored ideas of beauty, artifice and duality. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), distilled these ideas into a provocative exploration of vanity and moral decay, which shocked Victorian readers.

Wilde was particularly celebrated for his plays, with The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) establishing him as a leading dramatist of late-Victorian London — a first edition copy of the play sold for £138,600 at Christie’s in 2025. Other notable works include Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and An Ideal Husband (1895). A prominent figure of the Aesthetic movement, Wilde championed 'art for art's sake'.

Behind the brilliance lay personal turmoil. Married to Constance Lloyd, Wilde later began a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, at the height of his fame, he was convicted for ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years of hard labour. While in prison, he composed a letter to Douglas, which was posthumously published under the title De Profundis. Wilde’s experience also shaped his later writing, including the introspective The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). He died in Paris in 1900.

Wilde left behind a body of work as masterful, subversive and defiantly original as the man himself. As he famously wrote, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’