De Profundis

De Profundis ("out of the depths") is the long letter Oscar Wilde wrote in the final months of his two-year sentence in Reading Gaol (1895–1897), addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was permitted only one sheet of paper at a time; he wrote in pencil, on individual sheets, on a board across his knees, and was not permitted to send the letter while in prison.

The letter moves between Wilde's bitterness toward Douglas, his account of his own ruin, his sustained meditation on suffering as the form of life given to him in prison, and his extraordinary mature reading of the figure of Christ as the supreme artist of human life. It is at once a reproach, an autobiography, a religious meditation, and the most personal piece of writing Wilde ever produced.