The Selfish Giant and Other Tales

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, and then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to promote the Aesthetic Movement, also known as ‘Art for Art’s Sake’.

Despite achieving a first-class degree and winning the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde was unable to secure an Oxford scholarship. He consequently earned a living through lecturing and writing for periodicals. Following his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he attempted to establish himself as a writer, but initially with limited success.

However, his collections of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891), and A House of Pomegranates (1891), along with his sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually built his reputation as an original and modern talent. This reputation was further solidified by the immense popularity of his Society Comedies: Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all of which premiered in the West End between 1892 and 1895.

Wilde’s success was tragically brief. In 1891, he met and became deeply infatuated with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, at the peak of his theatrical career, Wilde initiated a libel suit against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, which he lost. Following two subsequent trials, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for acts of gross indecency. This harrowing experience inspired his work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Released from prison in 1897, Wilde immediately went into self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in disgrace in 1900.

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