Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years

This biography from Frankel (editor of The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition), an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, reminds readers that Oscar Wilde was a serious man of ideas, as well as the witty author of The Importance of Being Earnest. Frankel attends, in the first of the book’s two sections, to Wilde’s 1895 trial for “sodomy and gross indecency” and his subsequent imprisonment from 1895 to 1897. He delves deeply into the work Wilde wrote in prison, De Profundis, tracing its evolution from personal letter to spiritual reflection. The second and longer part of Frankel’s biography treats Wilde’s final three years of life, spent in exile and largely in France. The literary work at this section’s center is the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, about Wilde’s horrific prison experience; it was “the most successful of Wilde’s published works in his lifetime” and one that has never gone out of print. Meticulously documented and consistently illuminating, Frankel’s book is also uncommonly accessible. It demonstrates that Wilde, whose last two major works were inspired by his imprisonment, is newly relevant in a time filled with cries for prison reform. (Oct.)