We need to talk about the Wilde family
Emer O’Sullivan Bloomsbury €32.50
Ihave nothing to declare but my genius,’ bragged Oscar Wilde, but genius, according to Emer O’Sullivan, was the currency of the Wildes. The ‘genius’ of his father, Sir William – physician, philanderer, polymath and antiquarian – was often cited by his mother, Jane, whose own genius as a poet, political journalist and society hostess was noted by her many friends.
Young Oscar was raised by cosmopolitan parents among ‘the brilliant geniuses of Ireland’, the drawing room of 1 Merrion Square, Dublin, teeming with astronomers, artists, archaeologists and professors of Sanskrit. But Sir William, who sired three children before his marriage, flew close to the sun. The fall of the house of Wilde began with a scandalous trial that, as O’Sullivan shows, anticipated the one which in 1895 would destroy Oscar.
In 1864, an attractive young woman called Mary Travers accused Sir William of rape; Lady Wilde called Mary a liar, so Mary sued Lady Wilde for libel. Sir William’s name was eventually cleared, but the court costs were extortionate and the stress destroyed his health. After his death at 61, it transpired that he was drowning in debt.
When, soon afterwards, Oscar won Oxford University’s Newdigate Poetry Prize, his mother declared: ‘Well, after all we have genius. Attorneys can’t take that away.’
Oscar Wilde’s family background is placed in the foreground of this vivid and meticulously researched book. Previous biographies have downplayed Sir William’s importance to Ireland and ridiculed the flamboyance of his wife, but the couple emerge from these pages as the most prominent of their age.
There seems to be nothing O’Sullivan doesn’t know about William and Jane Wilde: their interests, influences, admirers, and enemies; what they read, said, thought and wrote. Far from standing alone as a self-invented figure, Oscar Wilde was the creation of his parents. From his father he inherited his drive to self-destruct, from his mother the ‘itch to play with fire’.
O’Sullivan’s focus is on the ‘inner dynamic’ of the Wilde family, which included Willie, Oscar’s troubled and talented older brother, whose own descent (into drink and despair) preceded the shaming of his sibling. She also paints a technicolor picture of 19th-century Dublin, a city ablaze with the Celtic Revival which William Wilde did much to ignite.
After her husband’s death in 1876, Jane and Willie moved to fin-de-siècle London, where she wrote for magazines and he occasionally dazzled as a journalist on the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, Oscar embarked on the lifestyle that would land him in Reading Jail.
Having stood by her husband when a beautiful young woman had attempted to destroy him, Jane now stood by her son as he was destroyed by a beautiful young man.
Oscar was in prison when his mother died, a pauper; the only mourner at her funeral was Willie, who could not afford a headstone. Willie’s own death, three years later in 1899, passed unnoticed by the press and the whereabouts of his grave is unknown.
Oscar’s parents had bequeathed him, he said, a name that they had ‘made noble’ and which he had ‘disgraced eternally’. But today, concludes O’Sullivan, the name of Wilde stands for ‘what is singular, independent-minded, and fearless’. Words that also describe this splendid book.
‘The name of Wilde stands for what is singular, independentminded and fearless’