The definitive study of the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde after his death, written by Wilde’s only grandson

Oscar Wilde died in November 1900, exiled in Paris and exhausted by scandal and prison life. The details of his life in the limelight are well known; what has regularly been ignored are the reverberations of the scandal for decades after his death: the myths and legends that have been created, the quarrels between his friends and enemies, the court cases...

In After Oscar, Merlin Holland charts the extraordinary afterlife of the legendary writer, thinker, wit, and decadent, tracing the dramatic fluctuations in Wilde’s posthumous reputation over the past 125 years. There is the story of his family—his sons Cyril and Vyvyan concealing their identities and selling off the family history; the story of his friends and their court cases; the stories of biographical inventions, forgeries, and impersonators (including sightings of Wilde with messages from beyond the grave); and stories of the biography industry that now surrounds Wilde’s life, as well as his position as a gay icon.

Merlin Holland
Merlin Holland, the only grandson of Oscar Wilde, is an author living in France. For the last 40 years he has been researching his grandfather’s life and works, and writes, lectures, and broadcasts regularly on the subject in English, French, and German. His most notable publications include Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess, the first complete, verbatim record of the libel trial which ultimately brought Oscar Wilde to ruin, and The Wilde Album, a pictorial biography of Oscar Wilde. After Oscar, his latest book, is an account of Oscar’s posthumous life and traces the extraordinary fluctuations in his grandfather’s reputation after his death. After Oscar’s conviction in 1895, his wife, Constance, and their two sons were forced to move abroad and change their name to Holland. The family has never reverted to the name Wilde.