Dueling Oscars

The 10 of us who attended last night's BookMen meeting enjoyed a very lively discussion of Matthew Sturgis' Oscar Wilde: A Life (the original title; the paperback edition goes by a much jauntier handle that somehow makes me think of the "Just Jack" running joke from "Will and Grace": Oscar). The Sturgis bio, published in 2019, has many strengths: clear prose, and skillful use of insights gained from Wilde's correspondence and other primary sources that only recently became available to researchers. (To take just one example, Sturgis cites a grandson of Wilde who has evidence that Constance Wilde died of multiple sclerosis rather than complications from syphilis contracted from her husband, as earlier writers had speculated.) It is an accessible, solid introduction to Wilde's life and work, and on that basis I concur with the other attendees who said they were glad to have read it.

All that said, I don't think Sturgis' account in any way supplants Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, published posthumously in 1988. I read it for the first time right before tackling Sturgis, as a way of establishing a baseline, and it was very useful. Although Ellmann's approach is highly academic and his prose is at times stodgy, he does something Sturgis does not: He is always careful to give the year in which events occur. His indexing is also much better than Sturgis's (when I looked up the reference to Constance Wilde mentioned above, none of the page numbers in the index matched the page that contains that note).  

Another reason I prefer Ellmann is that, after taking a cheap shot at his biography in the introduction, Sturgis proceeds to lift passage after passage from him! Sometimes he troubles himself to alter a few words, but most of the time he simply plunks Ellmann's work into his manuscript without giving any attribution. Not a gentlemanly act, as Wilde himself might remark.