Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde
A new trend in biography is to profile the woman behind the man. In the case of the immensely talented and tragically infamous Oscar Wilde, that woman was the beautiful, intelligent, and forward-thinking Constance Lloyd Wilde. Although Oscar’s sexual preferences were decidedly male, his marriage, in many ways, was a union of like minds and mutual respect. Constance, an author in her own right, a proponent of the rational dress movement, and a budding spiritualist, was, like her husband, on the cutting edge of more liberal Victorian trends. After Oscar’s incarceration for gross indecency in 1895, she was forced to flee to the Continent, where she and her children lived in exile until her premature death at 39 in 1898. Moyle does a great job of setting the scene, firmly grounding her subject in a society and a social order teetering on the edge of a remarkable transformation that unfortunately arrived too late for herself and her family. --Margaret Flanagan