The homoerotic novel Teleny is an important antithesis to the prudish idealism of the neo-classic and neo-romantic lyric love poetry of the fin du siecle. It is a work of unmasking the cynical double moral standards of the Victorian era: The love of Camille and Teleny is shattered by social reprisals. The book was published in 1893 in 200 copies by Leonard Smithers who praised it as being "the most powerful and cleverly written erotic romance which has appeared in the English language" during that era, "a book that will certainly rank as the chief of its class."
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford where, a disciple of Pater, he founded an aesthetic cult. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and his two sons were born in 1885 and 1886.
His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and social comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), established his reputation. In 1895, following his libel action against the Marquess of Queesberry, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and his confessional letter De Profundis (1905). On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900.
