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Oscar Wilde: The Complete Collection
Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde is famous almost in equal parts for his life as for his literary legacy. A dandy, a self-proclaimed cynic and a flamboyant homosexual at a time when it was illegal to be gay in the United Kingdom, he was simultaneously society’s greatest critic and a lightning rod for criticism.
His literary output, almost all written in the brief period 1889-1895, consists of some of the greatest works of English literature. Included in this collection are:
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) - his only novel
Short Stories:
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889)
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) - a collection of fairy tales with a twist
A House of Pomegranates (1891) - a similar collection
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891) - a collection of contemporary fiction containing the famous The Canterville Ghost.
Plays (the most famous works of his lifetime):
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
An Ideal Husband (1895)
Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880)
The Duchess of Padua (1883)
Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act (1894)
As well as two unfinished plays: La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy
All of his known poems (over 100), including The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a work about the time he spent in prison.
Letters and essays, including:
The Decay of Lying (1889)
The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
The Critic as Artist (1891)
De Profundis (1897)
and others.
Unfortunately, Wilde’s personality was too colorful for the conservative morals of upper-class British society. In 1895, after he was accused of “unnatural acts” by the father of one his lovers, the writer was prosecuted and sentenced to 2 years’ hard labor -- the maximum possible. The prison term broke both the writer’s health and his spirit.
This edition also includes a foreword and editor’s notes about the works.
This material was NOT merely scanned from an ink-and-paper book, like many Kindle e-books are. All e-books offered by Di Lernia Publishers are hand-edited and checked for spelling and punctuation errors.
His literary output, almost all written in the brief period 1889-1895, consists of some of the greatest works of English literature. Included in this collection are:
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) - his only novel
Short Stories:
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889)
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) - a collection of fairy tales with a twist
A House of Pomegranates (1891) - a similar collection
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891) - a collection of contemporary fiction containing the famous The Canterville Ghost.
Plays (the most famous works of his lifetime):
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
An Ideal Husband (1895)
Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880)
The Duchess of Padua (1883)
Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act (1894)
As well as two unfinished plays: La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy
All of his known poems (over 100), including The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a work about the time he spent in prison.
Letters and essays, including:
The Decay of Lying (1889)
The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
The Critic as Artist (1891)
De Profundis (1897)
and others.
Unfortunately, Wilde’s personality was too colorful for the conservative morals of upper-class British society. In 1895, after he was accused of “unnatural acts” by the father of one his lovers, the writer was prosecuted and sentenced to 2 years’ hard labor -- the maximum possible. The prison term broke both the writer’s health and his spirit.
This edition also includes a foreword and editor’s notes about the works.
This material was NOT merely scanned from an ink-and-paper book, like many Kindle e-books are. All e-books offered by Di Lernia Publishers are hand-edited and checked for spelling and punctuation errors.
1582 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2013
564 people are currently reading
662 people want to read
About the author
Oscar Wilde
5,496 books38.8k followersOscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 4, 2020
Arthur Conan Doyle meets Oscar Wilde
Stoddart, the American editor of Lippincott's Magazine, proved to be an excellent fellow, and had me and another writer to dinner in London. I discovered the other was Oscar Wilde, who was already a famous writer. It was indeed a golden evening for me. Wilde to my surprise had read my novel, "Micah Clarke" and was enthusiastic about it, so that I did not feel a complete outsider. His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact, for the monologue man, however, clever, can never be a gentleman at heart. He took as well as gave, but what he gave was unique. He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour, and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning.
The result of the evening was that both Wilde and I promised to write books for Lippincott's Magazine—Wilde's contribution was "The Picture of Dorian Grey," a book which is surely upon a high moral plane, while I wrote "The Sign of Four," in which Holmes made his second appearance. A young Rudyard Kipling, who could not make the dinner, wrote "The Light That Failed" for the magazine.
-Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1400...
Stoddart, the American editor of Lippincott's Magazine, proved to be an excellent fellow, and had me and another writer to dinner in London. I discovered the other was Oscar Wilde, who was already a famous writer. It was indeed a golden evening for me. Wilde to my surprise had read my novel, "Micah Clarke" and was enthusiastic about it, so that I did not feel a complete outsider. His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say. He had delicacy of feeling and tact, for the monologue man, however, clever, can never be a gentleman at heart. He took as well as gave, but what he gave was unique. He had a curious precision of statement, a delicate flavour of humour, and a trick of small gestures to illustrate his meaning.
The result of the evening was that both Wilde and I promised to write books for Lippincott's Magazine—Wilde's contribution was "The Picture of Dorian Grey," a book which is surely upon a high moral plane, while I wrote "The Sign of Four," in which Holmes made his second appearance. A young Rudyard Kipling, who could not make the dinner, wrote "The Light That Failed" for the magazine.
-Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1400...
April 13, 2018
*A Review for The Picture of Dorian Gray only* Five stars for Christian allegory. I don't think Wilde set out to write such an allegory, but in plumbing the depths of the human soul, as Wilde does so well, he certainly wrote a masterpiece about sin's affect on the soul and our absolute need for a saving grace. Wilde writes like an insider to both the hedonist point of view, represented by Lord Henry, and the theistic, represented by Basil Hallward, so well that it's a testament to his skill as a storyteller and his eclectic life experiences. There are one or two slow chapters, but still a completely worthwhile read.
August 13, 2023
A book with some interesting concepts but at times it was difficult for me to follow. Probably more of a reflection of my reading skills than the writing itself.
April 4, 2014
The fairy tales are the best part. They are very young tales where the greatest sin of the evil kings and queens are hypocrisy and entitlement. There is great tragedy in them also. There is a rage against that throughout. They fit well with youth of any generation and especially in that post WWII America of the 1960s.
The writing is beautiful and flowing, the only complaint being that in Dorian Gray for instance the writing gets in the way of the story a bit much and it could have been faster to the point - but it is an story based on obsession with esthetics after all.
Like Alan Turing, the man who help invent the modern computer and solve the codes of the war for Britian, Wilde was killed for his homosexuality. Very sad.
All of it is worth reading.
The writing is beautiful and flowing, the only complaint being that in Dorian Gray for instance the writing gets in the way of the story a bit much and it could have been faster to the point - but it is an story based on obsession with esthetics after all.
Like Alan Turing, the man who help invent the modern computer and solve the codes of the war for Britian, Wilde was killed for his homosexuality. Very sad.
All of it is worth reading.
February 26, 2018
This review is only for The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is . . . thought provoking! The plot is straightforward, but I am confused as to how such a "philosophical novel,"as Wikipedia calls it, fits into Wilde's philosophy of Aestheticism, which supports the "emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes" according to another Wikipedia article. Certainly, Wilde did not write this book as 'Art for Art's sake.' It is an argument about society and politics. Further, if Wilde was making a defense of Aestheticism in The Picture of Dorian Gray, why are the two characters most closely aligned with its philosophy horrible? Maybe I'm too dense to understand . . . ?
November 21, 2010
It's Oscar Wilde. It's beautiful. Read it.
September 12, 2019
I read it all!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews