A review by jenibo
Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann

4.0

A wonderful biography – a little too steeped in classical culture and literature for me to understand all the allusions properly, unfortunately. Covers Wilde in his flawed outrageousness and folly, brilliance and conceit, extravagance and tragedy. A huge personality; indulgent, dissipated and suffering, and, in the end brave in his understanding the significance of his life and of his death, and making sure that they were fitting in scale. Wilde became the conscience, after his death, of Victorian society and his fate, and his eloquence on the topics of love and justice and revenge and imprisonment was vital in the reform of its moralizing prudishness, as he believed it would be.

Ellman’s biography captures a man who is incredibly complex, inconsistent and self contradictory, aware of his own duality in terms of his public and personal life, even before his personal life involved cause for scandal.
Ellman manages to contribute to our understanding (as few biographies do) of what part of Wilde’s mind and nature gave rise to the best, and the worst of his works. Ellman evokes admiration from the reader both for his own massively researched and insightful opus, and wrings compassion and a sense of tragedy and a deeper understanding of the manifestatios of hubris from his
sometimes insincere, bored and proud, but always huge and fascinating subject.