![]() ![]() He spent a year in the US in 1882 lecturing about the decorative arts he edited a high-profile woman's magazine for two years he wrote thought-provoking and controversial critical essays as well as many art exhibition, theatre and book reviews. Oscar's 'serious' side is often overlooked. Apart from writing a couple of plays, a few children's stories, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Picture of Dorian Gray he doesn't seem to have done much This took considerable application as his contemporaries later testified and his surviving Oxford notebooks demonstrate. Oscar was certainly influenced by the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin and Walter Pater while at Oxford, and he adopted the pose of an effete young man, but he went up as a scholar to Magdalen and came down with a double first in classics and the Newdigate prize for poetry. He coasted through university, with a reputation for langorousness and a love of lilies His 'conversion' to homosexuality probably came about in 1886/7 with a young man who was to remain a lifelong friend, Robert Ross. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884, swiftly had two children with her and, by his own account, was blissfully happy in the first few years of his marriage. He seems to have been infatuated with Florence Balcombe (who later married Bram Stoker) for two years until he left Oxford in 1878, and had previously flirted with other young women in Dublin. This is most unlikely, to judge from his correspondence. As Oscar would write from prison in 1897: "She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured not merely in literature, art, archaeology and science, but in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation." 2. Oscar's mother, Jane, was a prominent Irish Nationalist and poet who was nearly imprisoned for her inflammatory anti-English writing in 1848. Sir William also published important contributions to the study of Celtic antiquities and Irish folklore. His father, Sir William, was a remarkable Dublin doctor whose medical work on the 18 censuses earned him his knighthood, and is still referred to today as essential source material for 19th century Irish history.
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