The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
  • Published: 1 December 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099415459
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $32.99

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Aug 2011
Paperback
1 Dec 2004
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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.

‘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The book draws of a vast range of sources, many of them previously unpublished, and includes startling new material like the statements made to the police by the male prostitutes and blackmailers ranged against Oscar Wilde at his trial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.
  • Published: 1 December 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099415459
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 752
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Neil McKenna

Neil McKenna is a freelance journalist, particularly for the Guardian and the Independent and a freelance producer and researcher for Channel 4. He is a notable campaigner for gay rights - the Clause 24 debate being largely a result of his work.

Praise for The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

Intriguing and entertaining...McKenna makes an impassioned case for re-gaying Wilde

The Times

A groundbreaking new biography of our greatest queer martyr

Observer

It cannot be recommended too highly. Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful

Manchester Evening News

This is by far and away the best biography of Oscar Wilde to date

John McRae, Professor of Literature

A bold book

The Guardian

Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful

The Manchester Evening News

A bustling, revealing and downright moving portrayal of thwarted genius

Attitude

Neil McKenna's book is the most important one to have been written about Wilde for many years

Irish Independent

McKenna’s book offers an entertaining and fascinating (sometimes jaw-dropping) insight into Victorian homosexual practices. He is outstanding

The Observer

A sensational new biography

Bent Magazine

A bustling, revealing and downright moving portrayal of thwarted genius

Arena

A brilliant reconstruction of Oscar Wilde's dynamic sex life, brilliantly written and meticulously researched

Bent Magazine

Where this biography really excels is in recreating the fevered atmosphere of the late Victorian homosexual underground

Mail on Sunday

A fully convincing biography of this most intensely symbolic of Victorian lives

Gay Times

McKenna makes many interesting connections between Wilde’s life and his literary works

Mail on Sunday
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