At 700 pages, AFTER OSCAR is a daunting tome, but it manages a rare feat. It is simultaneously exhaustive and essential for anyone wanting to understand the Wilde legacy. 

Merlin Holland has spent more than 40 years researching and writing about his grandfather Oscar Wilde’s life and works. This book focuses on Wilde’s last years and the chaotic “afterlife” of his reputation and work, as the public once more welcomed both his posthumous publications and their ensuing forgeries. The legal wrangling over these forgeries --- along with attempts by Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s onetime lover, to control posthumous publications, biographies and even his literary estate --- continued for years.

"At 700 pages, AFTER OSCAR is a daunting tome, but it manages a rare feat. It is simultaneously exhaustive and essential for anyone wanting to understand the Wilde legacy."

While the legal and copyright issues were significant, much of the book focuses on the impact that Wilde’s very public disgrace had on his two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, who never saw him after his release from prison in 1897. Meanwhile, his wife, Constance, who had remained loyal to him and supported him following his imprisonment, died in 1898, and the boys were sent to live with her family.

Constance’s loved ones tried to distance Cyril and Vyvyan from the taint that their father cast over them, sending them to different schools, keeping them away from his friends, and changing their last name to their mother’s. They were told their father was dead, even though Wilde did not die until 1900, and it took years before they understood what was “wrong” with him.

Holland reveals the contrasting paths that the brothers took. Cyril was driven to “wipe the stain away” through military service, while Vyvyan struggled with the same financial profligacy that dogged his father. Cyril died from a sniper’s bullet on the Western Front in 1915 at the age of 30. Vyvyan eventually took over as Wilde’s literary executor when Robbie Ross, who befriended the boys and helped to support Vyvyan financially, passed away in 1918. 

After a life of ambiguity about his heredity (though he eventually wrote a memoir, SON OF OSCAR WILDE), Vyvyan died in 1967 at the age of 80. Holland helped his mother, Thelma, manage the estate until her passing in 1995 (she was significantly younger than her husband).

Productions of Oscar Wilde’s plays are now routinely performed on stages in the UK and the US, as well as in Europe and even Asia. This fascinating, highly detailed and moving book illustrates how his genius was finally acknowledged as social mores evolved --- though that recognition came at a heavy price for his family and friends.