After Oscar : The Legacy of a Scandal

Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, exiled in Paris and exhausted by scandal and prison life. The details of his life in the limelight are well known; what has regularly been ignored are the reverberations of the scandal for decades after his death: the myths and legends that have been created, the quarrels between his friends and enemies, the court cases...

In After Oscar, Merlin Holland charts the extraordinary afterlife of the legendary writer, thinker, wit, and decadent, tracing the dramatic fluctuations in Wilde’s posthumous reputation over the past 125 years. There is the story of his family—his sons Cyril and Vyvyan concealing their identities and selling off the family history; the story of his friends and their court cases; the stories of biographical inventions, forgeries, and impersonators (including sightings of Wilde with messages from beyond the grave); and stories of the biography industry that now surrounds Wilde’s life, as well as his position as a gay icon.