Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties

THIS book is a publisher’s delight; it is out of the very top drawer of high-grade commercial biography. Miss Winwar deserves all praise for her excellent workmanship. She writes extremely well, and the organization of her work shows a sensitive literary conscience rather rare in these days. Her presentation of the Yellow Nineties comes out of a well-stored mind, and is shaped by an editorial sense that most of her contemporaries might envy.

In any but a commercial view, however, her choice of a subject is most unfortunate. The Yellow Nineties’ cultural nexus with the present was well enough established in advance by Max Nordau’s Degeneration, published in 1895. Oscar Wilde had great ability, and his works may safely be left to attest it. His personality and entourage, from first to last, were such as no serious person would wish to examine, still less recall, still less dwell upon. Miss Winwar’s book carries the reader through courses of squalid delinquency almost subhuman, and the many who appear to crave the titillation of this experience may be advised accordingly.