H.’ One of the characters in Wilde’s story believes he has cracked this literary mystery: ‘W. Aptly, it was placed in a handbag.Ī short story (later expanded into a novella) inspired by the mysterious dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from 1609, ‘Mr W. In 2007, a first edition of the play was donated to a charity shop in Nantwich, Cheshire. It’s known for Lady Bracknell’s famous two-word line: ‘A handbag?’ It’s a very witty play whose plot is in the tradition of old English comedies and farces. Wilde’s best-known play, from 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest – which sees two male friends, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, creating the perfect fictional excuse to explain their double lives to those closest to them – has been read in light of Wilde’s own double life (wife and children in Chelsea, assignations with young men in Soho). The story is essentially a variation on the Faust tale, with the titular Dorian Gray (a young, handsome man) giving his soul in exchange for the ability to remain young and handsome while the portrait of him ages and decays, especially as Dorian slides further into moral corruption and sin. The novel is a witty blend of Gothic horror with the ideas underpinning Aestheticism, or the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement. But in many ways Wilde’s only novel is the ultimate Victorian moral fable, about the dangers of living a selfish life driven by the pursuit of ‘new sensations’ above all else.

Wilde’s famous preface to this – his one novel, published in book form in 1891 after being serialised the year before – states that ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’.

Oscar wilde books