
Tom Paulin’s latest book is The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer.
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RELATED CATEGORIES
Wilde, Oscar, Biography and memoirs, Biography, 1800-1899, 1860-1879, 1800-1899, 1880-1899, Europe, Western Europe, Ireland
Vol. 5 No. 21 · 17 November 1983
pages 20-22 | 3079 words

Oscar and Constance
Tom Paulin
- The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd
Hamish Hamilton, 185 pp, £7.95, April 1983, ISBN 0 241 10964 7
- The Importance of Being Constance: A Biography of Oscar Wilde’s Wife by Joyce Bentley
Hale, 160 pp, £8.75, May 1983, ISBN 0 7090 0538 5
- Mrs Oscar Wilde: A Woman of Some Importance by Anne Clark Amor
Sidgwick, 249 pp, £8.95, June 1983, ISBN 0 283 98967 X
In the spring of 1882, Oscar Wilde travelled to a huge mining town in the Rocky Mountains called Leadville, where he lectured the miners on the ‘secret of Botticelli’. A fortnight later, he gave a lecture at the State University of Nebraska. Afterwards the students took him out to the State penitentiary where he saw:
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[*] Quoted by R.K.R. Thornton in his recent and helpful study, The Decadent Dilemma (Arnold, 215 pp., £19.50, 10 March, 0 4131 6372 0).
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Letters
Vol. 6 No. 1 · 19 January 1984
From Michael Pye
SIR: Peter Ackroyd’s novel on Oscar Wilde is a marvellous book and its speculations are remarkably close to fact – even that affair between Lords Drumlanrig and Rosebery, which your reviewer (LRB Vol. 5, No 21) suggests was ‘tantalisingly manufactured’. Actually, there were strong rumours at the time of Drumlanrig’s death that he had been Rosebery’s lover, that the death was suicide, and the scandal had been laboriously covered up. Whether the monstrous Queensberry knew or not, H. Montgomery Hyde reported letters in which the Marquis may have suggested at the very least that Rosebery ‘was having a bad effect on Francis’. And the Marquis did once, at Homburg, pursue the Lord Rosebery with a dog whip until the Prince of Wales was forced to intervene. Curiously, these stories are in sources which your reviewer must know (since he cites one): H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Love that Dared Not Speak its Name and The Trials of Oscar Wilde.
Michael Pye
New York