The Journal
The best Oscar Wilde works to read on Foxing
Oscar Wilde published relatively little -- a single novel, a handful of plays, two collections of fairy tales, and a body of critical and social essays. Almost all of it is first-rate, and all of his major works are free to read on Foxing. This is where to start and what to read next.
Start here: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)#
The Importance of Being Earnest is Wilde at his most purely achieved. A short play -- about 90 minutes to read -- in which two men maintain elaborate false identities to escape social obligations, and the comedy that results when their inventions collide. Every line is calibrated. Every social convention is treated as theatre. The observation that "in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing" is Wilde's deepest argument in his wittiest form.
The play opened on 14 February 1895, the same year Wilde was arrested. It was his last work produced during his lifetime. Free on Foxing.
The novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)#
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Wilde's only novel and his most substantial work. A young man's portrait records the moral damage he refuses to see in himself -- growing more monstrous with each sin while he stays eternally young. It is part Gothic horror, part philosophical argument about the relationship between beauty and morality, and part roman a clef about Wilde's own circle. For the full symbolic reading of what the portrait represents, that analysis covers the critical landscape in detail. Free on Foxing.
The social comedy: An Ideal Husband (1895)#
An Ideal Husband is Wilde's most politically serious play. Sir Robert Chiltern has built his career on a secret -- he sold a government secret early in his career to make his fortune. A woman arrives with evidence of this and proceeds to use it. The play is about the gap between public reputation and private reality, and about whether a person can be forgiven for the compromises they made before they became who they are. Funnier than its subject sounds. Free on Foxing.
The fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)#
Wilde wrote two collections of fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). "The Happy Prince," "The Selfish Giant," and "The Nightingale and the Rose" are among the most beautifully constructed short fiction he wrote -- moral fables in the Hans Christian Andersen tradition that are simultaneously for children and about things children cannot fully understand. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
The prison poem: The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)#
Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol after his release from prison in 1897. It is his finest poem and one of the most direct things he ever wrote -- based on watching a fellow prisoner, Charles Thomas Wooldridge, hanged during his time at Reading Gaol. The refrain -- "each man kills the thing he loves" -- summarises something Wilde had been circling since Dorian Gray. Available free at Project Gutenberg.
The prison letter: De Profundis (1905)#
De Profundis is the long letter Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison, published posthumously in partial form and in full in 1962. It is simultaneously a reckoning, a document of grief, and a spiritual autobiography -- the most personally revealing thing he ever wrote. For the biography of Wilde and the full context of the trial, who Oscar Wilde was and why he was put in prison covers that history.
Further reading#
For the life of Wilde and the trial that ended his career, the full biography is the essential companion.
For other Victorian writers who used social comedy to make moral arguments, what to read if you loved Pride and Prejudice includes Wilde alongside Austen and Trollope.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, and An Ideal Husband are all free on Foxing.