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The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde is Neil McKenna’s acclaimed and controversial first biography. The books charts fully for the first time Oscar Wilde’s astonishing erotic odyssey through Victorian London’s sexual underworld.
This bestselling book makes a compelling and convincing argument that Oscar Wilde was driven personally and creatively by his powerful desires for sex with young men and that his work can only be fully understood in terms of his sexuality.
Drawing on a vast array of previously unknown and unpublished material, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde meticulously and brilliantly reconstructs Oscar Wilde’s emotional and sexual life, painting an astonishingly frank and vivid psychological portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.
book reviews
- The Observer
‘A groundbreaking new biography of our greatest queer martyr’ - Senator David Norris, the Irish Independent
‘Neil McKenna’s book is the most important to have been written about Wilde for many years. It is whiskey to Ellmann’s water. This is because McKenna understands and reveals ... for the first time the real nature of Wilde’s developing sexuality and its role in his artistic as well as his personal life.’ - Professor John McRae, the Oscholars
‘This is far and away the best biography of Oscar Wilde to date’ - Manchester Evening News
‘It cannot be recommended to highly. Extraordinary, intensely passionate and quite beautiful.’ - The Guardian
‘a bold book’ - The Mail on Sunday
‘Where this biography really excels is in recreating the fevered atmosphere of the late Victorian homosexual underground and the paranoia of the political establishment in the face of Wilde’s bold crusade.’ - The Times
‘Intriguing and entertaining ... McKenna makes an impassioned plea for re-gaying Wilde’ - The Pink Paper
‘Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in a smoking jacket ... fascinating’ - Bent
‘Brilliantly written and meticulously researched this new biography tells you everything you ever wanted to know about Oscar Wilde but never dared to ask.’ - Publishers Weekly
‘ McKenna's masterful, eminently readable new work takes a sharp, very productive turn in Wilde scholarship… the most exciting and important Wilde scholarship to be published in decades.’ - Library Journal
‘ McKenna offers a brilliant portrait of Wilde's literary genius and his often-tortured personal life…this majestic study offers a glimpse into the complex sexual mores of the Victorian world, where Wilde lived his homosexual literary life with bravado. A nice complement to Richard Ellmann's definitive Wilde biography, this is recommended for all libraries.’ - Guidemag.com
‘ The genius of McKenna's book is that-- for the contemporary reader-- he reinvents Wilde as the flagrant, determined, and highly politicized homosexual that he was. (As I said, Wilde would have loved it.)…There are so many great things about The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde it's difficult to know where to begin. What McKenna has done-- and this is a brilliant, radical move in Wilde scholarship-- is to take as his premise that Wilde's homosexuality was integral to his physical, emotional, intellectual, and political life…This is a biographical re- invention of which Wilde would have been proud.’ - Rocky Mountain News
‘ Neil McKenna's masterful biography of the 19th-century poet and playwright…Overall this book achieves the rare distinction of making the familiar fresh. It's an unvarnished look at the life of Oscar Wilde that's all the more compelling for its candor. ’ - Washington Post
‘ Neil McKenna has produced a superb new portrait of the secret life of one of the 19th century's most tragic and beguiling figures…This meticulous reconstruction of Wilde's "sexual journey" breaks important new ground by placing Wilde at the center of a pantheon of gay sexual revolutionaries…This book reads like the great tragedy Wilde's life was. One of the greatest joys of writing it undoubtedly came from the numerous Wilde aphorisms that McKenna was able to intersperse in the text. Wilde once remarked that there were only three ways to get into society: feed it, amuse it or shock it. "He used all three tactics simultaneously," McKenna observes, and the results are magnificently recorded in these pages. ’
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