Review: Michèle Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, 2018) & Matthew Sturgis, Oscar: A Life (Head of Zeus Ltd, 2018)

Abstract

In ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890; 1891), Oscar Wilde’s spokesperson Gilbert declares ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ One book that bears out Gilbert’s claim is Lord Alfred Douglas’ Oscar Wilde and Myself (1914), but many later biographers have served Wilde more charitably, and none more so than Richard Ellmann, whose influential 1987 account concludes that Wilde was ‘so generous, so amusing, and so right’.