Oscar Wilde ‘had a fondness for white supremacy’

 Oscar Wilde had racist sympathies, according to an Oxford academic who says a “fondness for white supremacy” was a “family trait”.

The playwright made a “pilgrimage” to the home of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate leader, during a speaking tour of the US, and spoke admiringly of his slave-owning uncle.

The claims are made by Prof Michele Mendelssohn in Making Oscar Wilde, a new biography that focuses on his visit to the US in 1882.

Wilde’s uncle was John Kingsbury Elgee, who emigrated to New Orleans in the early 19th century and owned a sugar plantation with 515 slaves. Elgee was the brother of Wilde’s sister, Speranza, and “an Elgee family trait was a fondness for white supremacy”, Prof Mendelssohn writes.

Speaking to an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Prof Mendelssohn said: “I love him and it was because of that love that I wanted to discover what makes him tick. Certainly when I discovered the white supremacist bit, I was not in love with him.” In the book, she says Wilde was “admiring” of white supremacy but his views on race were not unusual for the era and “showed he was human”.