Oscar Wilde led a cosmopolitan lifestyle as a writer, playwright, journalist, intellectual, and aesthete. An exceptionally gifted student, Wilde studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, on scholarship. At Oxford, Wilde came under the influence of tutor Walter Pater’s Aesthetic philosophy—“art for arts sake”—and developed a reputation as an eccentric, flamboyant, and foppish young man. Moving from Oxford to London upon graduation, Wilde then published his first volume of poems to some critical acclaim. Though a fledgling writer, Wilde’s fame as a proponent of Aestheticism grew during his yearlong lecture tour of the United States, England, and Ireland. Wilde married Dublin heiress Constance Lloyd in 1884. In the years following the couple had two sons, while Wilde published his serialized novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray and made his way as writer and editor in London’s publishing scene. Wilde met his lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, an undergraduate at Oxford, in 1891. Wilde’s career as a playwright flourished in the coming years as he wrote a number of successful plays for the Paris and London stages including
Lady Windemere’s Fan,
Salomé,
An Ideal Husband, and finally
The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. But Wilde’s success was short-lived as he became embroiled in scandal. A series of trials that pitted Wilde against Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, exposed Wilde’s homosexuality, causing him to be charged and sentenced for “gross indecency.” After serving two years in prison, Wilde retired to the European continent, where he wrote occasionally under an assumed name, briefly rekindled his romance with Lord Alfred, and converted to Catholicism. Shrouded in infamy, Wilde died of cerebral meningitis in Paris at the turn of the 20th century.