num_pages: 717
description: ‘I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work’.So said Oscar Wilde of his remarkable life – a life more complex, more erotic, more troubled and more triumphant than any of his contemporaries ever knew or suspected.Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld.Oscar Wilde emerges as a man driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with men, and Neil McKenna argues compellingly and convincingly that Oscar’s Wilde’s life and work can only be fully understood and appreciated in terms of his sexuality.The book draws of a vast range of sources, many of them previously unpublished, and includes startling new material like the statements made to the police by the male prostitutes and blackmailers ranged against Oscar Wilde at his trial which have been lost for over a century.Dazzlingly written, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.
language: English
title: The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
titlecomplete: The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
characters: George Alexander, George Ives, Archibald Brainridge, John  Gray, Dorian Gray, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Browning, Constance Lloyd, Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig, Frank Harris, Cyril Graham, Walter Pater, Henry Labouchère, Alec Scudder, André Gide, Robert Sherard, Lord Alfred Douglas, Robbie Ross, More Adey, Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, William Shakespeare, Reginald Turner, Edward Carson, W.H. Auden, Willie Hughes, George Bernard Shaw, Marc-André Raffalovich, Walt Whitman, Clive Durham, William Butler Yeats, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Hall, Richard Ellmann, Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Edward Shelley, Charles Kains Jackson
genres: Historical, Biography, Queer, LGBT, British Literature, Nonfiction, Gay, Literature, Biography Memoir, History
ratings_count: 738
places: England, Paris, London, England
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Non-Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Randy Shilts Award
category: Gay Nonfiction
publisher: Arrow