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whisper88's review against another edition
Less about Oscar Wilde and more about superfluous fluff that happened during his time period. Links between people, places, & ideologies were poorly represented and explained. This may have been good if it had been better edited and more focused.
gavinmulligan's review
informative
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
3.25
A large portion of the book focuses on Wilde’s North American lecture tour 1882-83. Contains some spoilers for The Picture of Dorian Gray and A Woman of No Importance. A very good read.
jenrok's review
4.0
Heavily researched. Very informative. Fresh look at the formative experiences of Oscar Wilde, specifically the effect of his 1882 American tour on his personality and work.
remedialqueer's review
5.0
With its emphasis on the impact of Wilde’s American tour and placing Wilde in the context of not only Irish ethnicity but white US understandings of blackness, and minstrel performance on both sides of the pond, it is an extremely illuminating work & draws on and incredibly rich and previously unassembled archive. Fascinating from beginning to end.
rociog's review
5.0
For some reason I thought I knew a lot about Oscar Wilde. Michéle Mendelssohn's wondrous biography proved me wrong in the best of ways. The book centres specifically on the year Wilde spent lecturing in the United States and the many ways in which this period of his life laid the groundwork for his later success as a writer, aesthete, and personality. What's particularly interesting about Mendelssohn's work is the fascinating look it offers at the inner workings of Victorian celebrity culture. Wilde, she suggests, made himself into a celebrity before he had any work to back him up (the enduring legacy of his writing is proof enough that he did produce it later on) through a series of interviews and stunts throughout the many stops of his North American lecturing tour. His public persona became a steadfast feature of his literary work in a way that, as we all know, eventually guaranteed his downfall. I was enthralled by Mendelssohn's careful tracing of the imbrication between different kinds of bigotry (anti-irishness, anti-blackness, machismo) present in the American media's response to Wilde. It truly drove home the many ways in which the Victorian era holds a mirror to our own.
sakura's review against another edition
3.0
informative and interesting, although the discussion of race was really poorly done for the most part and detracted from the overall experience of reading this.
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