Anthony Quinn Reviews New Oscar Wilde Biography

The Guardian takes a close look at a new Oscar Wilde biography by Matthew Sturgis. Sturgis, Quinn writes, is no "great storyteller," but, rather, "a tremendous orchestrator of material, fastidious, unhurried, indefatigable." From there: 

Do we need a new life of Wilde? He thinks so; the last major biography, by Richard Ellmann in 1987, took a literary critic’s approach, to the detriment of the facts and chronology of Wilde’s life. It was strewn with errors, and tended to blur truth and legend – something Wilde himself often connived at.

Sturgis, armed with new discoveries such as a full transcript of the libel trial, an early notebook and previously unknown letters, aims to return the man “to his times, and to the facts”, to lend the life “a sense of contingency”. At 720 pages in my edition, with a further 137 pages of endnotes, that may be rather more contingency than your average reader can handle.

But Oscar repays the effort, even for those who have read the Ellmann and the earlier biographies by Hesketh Pearson and Montgomery Hyde – and all the letters. I’m not sure if I already knew certain details about the early life, but I was glad to be reminded, for instance, of how close the teenage Wilde came to joining the Roman Catholic church (and was disinherited on account of it by his half-brother); of how, as a student at Oxford University, he was inducted into the Masons in 1875; of how he joined John Ruskin’s road-digging enterprise in the village of North Hinksey and learned how to push a barrow along a plank (“very difficult”). Most startling of all (Ellmann mentions this, too) was his early ambition to follow the example of Matthew Arnold and become an inspector of schools. We must credit providence that the board turned him down.

Read more at The Guardian.