Reviews for Oscar Wilde His Life and Confessions

The average rating for Oscar Wilde His Life and Confessions based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-24 00:00:00 Krupali Patel Let me first qualify this review by saying that I am a huge Oscar Wilde fan (I not only own a copy, but have read cover to cover, his compiled works, my favorite novel is A Picture of Dorian Grey, and I own an Oscar Wile action figure...) Really it was only a matter of time before I began reading his biographies (the one I have on the shelf next is Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde... I really found myself enjoying Frank Harris's biography of him. I think that Oscar himself would have been rather pleased with this book for the most part (at least the 2/3 that are his life before imprisonment and spiral into despair.) Frank was one of his dear friends in life and gives a first hand account of life with Oscar. Oscar admired Frank so much that he dedicated my favorite of his plays, An Ideal Husband, to him. This book shows not so much the flesh and blood Wilde as it does the brilliant, larger than life masterpiece Wilde presented of himself to the world. The true fascination of Wilde is this ability to be such a charming contradiction of all the norms of society. I found myself seeing a lot of the facts of his imprisonment and life after in a slightly different, and oddly more favorable light. I thought that Oscar was in a much more miserable and destitute situation than Frank portrays and am very fond of his friends and admirers who helped him all the way to the end. A biography of Wilde's life really reads quite a bit like a novel (and even more shockingly almost parallels his one novel- A Picture of Dorian Grey.) I loved all the quirky and witty quotes from dinner conversations and if I could go back in time and meet ANYONE I would want it to be him. This book only further deepened that conviction instead of dragging me away from it.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-20 00:00:00 Duane Cartmill Beautifully written, it is quite a pageturner. But it known for being inaccurate and selfserving, it is almost as much about Harris as it is about Wilde. Harris reproduces lies and rumors about Wilde and it's hard to even trust the conversations he claims to have had with Wilde. But it gives an insight in Wilde as he would have appeared to another Englishman at the time. His portrait of Wilde is full of contradictions, but at the same time it is a very intimate portrait. And though it doesn't portrait Oscar Wilde the way som admirers would like to remember him, it could still be accurate. The book is a must read, but to understand Oscar Wilde one has to read at least one more biography.