SOURCE: Glaenzer, Richard Butler. Introduction to The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and Other Stories, pp. ix-xviii. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Company, 1927.

In the following essay, Glaenzer delineates the defining characteristics of the stories in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories and contends that Wilde's short stories are overshadowed by his dramas.

Oscar Wilde was a multiplex personality, and nowhere is this driven home so forcibly as in his so-called short stories; for such, in the accepted sense, they are not. While they possess plot, development, motivation of a sort, somehow they detach themselves from the plane of verisimilitude, even that idealized portion of it known as the realm of Romance.

One and all of the following prose pieces were written in the latter eighties, when Wilde was still groping for his true medium. They reflect...