'Only mediocrities progress,' Wilde wrote in 1894. 'An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.'
This volume collects together the masterpieces that appeared during Wilde's earliest revolutions as an artists, the stories which first made his name as a writer of fiction. It includes the complete texts of The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), A House of Pomegranates (1891), and Lord Arthur Saville's Crime and Other Stories (1891), together with his six Poems in Prose and 'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.', inspired by 'the onlie Begetter' of Shakespeare's Sonnets, loved by Wilde 'as one should love all things, not wisely but too well."
Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction, comedies of manners--these stories find Wilde at work subverting late-Victorian expectations and trying out his own distinctive forms of melodrama and parody. They defy our modern expectations too in the brilliance of their vision and paradox and in the audacity of their wit.
Edited With an Introduction and Notes by Ian Small
About the Author
Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford where, a disciple of Pater, he founded an aesthetic cult. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and his two sons were born in 1885 and 1886.
His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and social comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), established his reputation. In 1895, following his libel action against the Marquess of Queesberry, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and his confessional letter De Profundis (1905). On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900.
