Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions

Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who "knew" the subject more or less intimately, and the more objective or scholarly accounts produced by later generations. In the case of Wilde, as presented to us by Frank Harris, we are in a way doubly estranged from the subject. We meet with Oscar the charismatic talker, whose tone of voice can never be reproduced – even if a more scrupulous biographer had set down his words accurately – and we are perhaps already aware of him as Wilde the self-destructive celebrity who uneasily fills the place of the premier gay icon and martyr in our contemporary view.