Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was the son of the distinguished surgeon Sir William Wilde and of Jane Francesca Elgee, a feminist and ardent proponent of Irish nationalism. After studying classics at Trinity College, Dublin, Wilde won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a reputation as a brilliant scholar. After his graduation in 1878, Wilde took up residence in London, where he soon established himself as a writer and leader of a new aesthetic movement that championed “art for art’s sake” and promoted the works of contemporary French poets and critics. Witty, outspoken, and flamboyant, Wilde enjoyed great success as a spokesman for aestheticism in both England and America; he also attracted considerable notoriety—in 1881, Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan poked fun at Wilde and aestheticism in their comic opera, Patience. That same year, Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a handsome young man’s moral corruption is reflected in the increasing ugliness of his portrait, caused a sensation among the English reading public. Outside the novel, Wilde was a successful poet and essayist too, but he achieved his greatest triumphs as a writer of social comedies for the stage—Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895).
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