‘The Wildes’ by Louis Bayard    (2024)  –  296 pages

I did not know that Oscar Wilde had a wife Constance and two sons Cyril and Vyvyan. ‘The Wildes’ begins with the Wilde family staying at a rented house called Grove Farm in Norfolk on vacation in August, 1892. Oscar’s mother Lady Wilde is also staying with them. Oscar also has invited his poet friend Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar calls him Bosie) who is sixteen years younger than him to stay with them on vacation.

Here is Oscar as husband and father, family man. Of course, if you are going to write a book featuring Oscar Wilde, you as an author better be capable of putting witty words in his mouth. Louis Bayard does accomplish this.

“What is it you always say, Oscar, about fox hunters?”

“The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

The dialogue throughout ‘The Wildes’ is sharp.

During their stay at Grove Farm, wife Constance gradually realizes that her husband and Bosie are up to something indiscreet at night in Bosie’s room.

Later, in 1895, resulting from his feud with Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, Oscar Wilde was charged with gross indecency with other males and spent nearly two years in prison.

The second section of the Wildes takes place in 1897 in Bogliasco, Italy where Constance is now living with her two sons. She hears that Oscar Wilde has been released from prison and has gone to another part of Italy, Naples, near where Lord Alfred is now living.

“The explaining part is almost childishly simple. Lord Alfred, having managed to put him in one gaol, now desires to put him in another. And in this he has the prisoner’s own consent.”

She sits there quiet. Then she leans across the table and begins hissing with such vehemence that even Arthur’s phlegmatic face begins to fissure beneath it.

The last sections of this novel are devoted to Oscar’s two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Cyril wanted to be nothing like his father and succeeded. He became a sniper during World War I shooting unsuspecting German soldiers. He died in battle during the war. Vyvyan, a more artistic type, returned to Soho in London where he encounters Lord Alfred Douglas in 1925.

The very last section imagines what could have happened if Constance could have somehow intervened successfully and put herself between Oscar and Bosie during that early 1892 vacation.

I was constantly entertained and enlightened by ‘The Wildes’.

Grade:     A