Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years

Nicholas Frankel presents a new and revisionary account of Wilde’s final
years, spent in poverty and exile on the European continent following
his release from an English prison for the crime of “gross indecency”
between men. Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years challenges the
prevailing, traditional view of Wilde as a broken, tragic figure, a
martyr to Victorian sexual morality, and shows instead that he pursued
his post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying
to resurrect his literary career.
After two bitter years of
solitary confinement, Frankel shows, Wilde emerged from prison in 1897
determined to rebuild his life along lines that were continuous with the
path he had followed before his conviction, unapologetic and even
defiant about the crime for which he had been convicted. England had
already done its worst. In Europe’s more tolerant atmosphere, he could
begin to live openly and without hypocrisy.
Frankel overturns
previous misunderstandings of Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred
Douglas, the great love of his life, with whom he hoped to live
permanently in Naples, following their secret and ill-fated elopement
there. He describes how and why the two men were forced apart, as well
as Wilde’s subsequent relations with a series of young men. Oscar Wilde pays close attention to Wilde’s final two important works, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol,
while detailing his nearly three-year residence in Paris. There,
despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde attempted to rebuild
himself as a man―and a man of letters.