
Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde
Author: Oscar Wilde | Published: -
Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde Synopsis
Excerpt from Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde Online Book
There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible ‘points of view’ his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says.
About Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was a renowned Irish playwright and novelist who left an indelible mark on literature. His artistry explored the social conventions of Victorian society, while also tackling important themes such as beauty and love. Wilde's works remain popular to this day, with many of his plays still being performed regularly across the world.
Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, where he achieved considerable academic success at Trinity College Dublin before moving to Oxford University. At both universities, he wrote extensively and developed his talent for satire and drama that would come to define much of his later writing style. He penned several novels including ‘The Picture Of Dorian Gray’ in 1890 and one of his most famous plays - ‘The Importance Of Being Earnest’ - was first staged in 1895. Find out more about Oscar Wilde at sevenov.com.