Oscar Wilde - Six of the Best

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.

In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words.

These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 in Dublin Ireland. The son of Dublin intellectuals Oscar proved himself an outstanding classicist at Dublin, then at Oxford. Oscar moved to London and its fashionable cultural and social circles. With his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, he became one of the most well-known personalities of his day.

His only novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ was published in 1890 and he then moved on to writing for the stage with Salome in 1891. His society comedies produced enormous hits and turned him into one of the most successful writers of late Victorian London.

Whilst his masterpiece, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, was on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency. He was convicted and imprisoned for two years' hard labour. It was to break him.

On release he left for France, and there he wrote his last work, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in 1898. His works as a poet are a fascinating insight to his views and workings as well as excellent in themselves. It is a proud legacy of works.

He died destitute in Paris on the 30th of November, 1900 at the age of forty-six sipping champagne a friend had brought with the line ‘Alas I am dying beyond my means’.

© 2025 Six of the Best (E-bog): 9781806373543

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E-bog: 4. november 2025