Unmasking of Oscar Wilde

The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde by Joseph Pearce, 398 pages

Oscar Wilde was, undoubtedly, one of the most elusive literary figures in history.  Few writers have so reveled in artifice, in being serious about frivolity, in the wearing and discarding of masks.  Yet, to believe Joseph Pearce, this artificiality was a feature of Wilde's public persona, and although his private life was full of sordid deception, it was earnestly so, while in his art he was consistent, honest, and above all moral.

Pearce's book functions mainly as a corrective to Richard Ellmann's magisterial biography of Wilde, and more generally to what he describes as over a century of misinterpretations by "the prurient and the puritan", both of whom reduce the man to his vices, whether celebrated or deplored.  Pearce situates Wilde in the context of the wider Decadent movement, illuminating his path by the lights of Huysmans and Verlaine, Thompson and Dowson and Beardsley.  Like them, his life would end either "at the point of a gun or at the foot of the Cross."  Only by grasping this can the man behind the masks be uncovered.