Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to accomplished parents, a surgeon father and a poet mother. He excelled in classics at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and embraced the aesthetic creed of art for art's sake. Arriving in London, he made himself famous by sheer force of wit, lecturing, writing, and dazzling society before publishing a word of his major work.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, scandalized and fascinated readers in 1890. Then came the comedies: Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and in 1895 The Importance of Being Earnest, perhaps the most perfect comedy in English. At the height of this success, his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry collapsed, and Wilde was tried and sentenced to two years' hard labour for gross indecency.

Prison broke his health but produced De Profundis and, after his release, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He died in Paris in 1900, aged forty-six, impoverished and in exile. Time reversed the verdict of his age: his plays returned to the stage and never left, his epigrams entered the language, and he was pardoned posthumously in 2017. His grave at Père Lachaise remains a place of pilgrimage.