Customer Reviews

Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide

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I'm a graduate student studying Wilde, and really appreciated this thoughtful and challenging book. So much of the scholarship on the most interesting issues--gender, sexuality, identity--is original only in its jargonistic neologisms. This book is different: straightforward, solidly researched, beautifully written, and sympathetic to Wilde.

This is simply the best book on Oscar Wilde that I've ever read. A must read for Wilde scholars and an enjoyable read for Wilde enthusiasts.

This psychoanalytic biography of Wilde explores more aspects of his life than many of the better known biographies, even Ellmann's. Well-researched, well-written, fun to read. Wilde's isolation, complicated relationship to his young sister who died and his parents, and terror of syphilis, are all explored in this interesting and enjoyable book

It is remarkable that this sensationalistic and inaccuate text has gained the respect and attention that it has amassed both among the scholarly and popular press alike. Knox's "research" is pure Freudian fantasy, and her thesis reliant upon hyperbole and a serious misreading of Wilde's work and more importantly (for the sake of her argument), his family dynamics. The success of this book is puzzling to me as a Wilde scholar; there are enough factual inaccuracies and flights of rhetorical fancy here to lead me to conclude that the educated, late-20th century reader, like his Victorian counterpart, loves a good scandal enough to ignore both logic and whatever overwhelming evidence may prove to the contrary. Scholarship this certainly is not; I recommend those curious about Wilde's life and work attend to Ellmann, Freedman and other scholarly Wilde critics and biographers for more factual and less trendy fare. As a Ph. D. candidate in Victorian Literature and long-time Wildean scholar, I was surprised and disappointed with both Knox's premise and her text.