The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

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The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Lasttestoscar.jpg
First edition cover
Author Peter Ackroyd
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Hamish Hamilton
Publication date
April 1983
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN 978-0-241-10964-9

The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde is a 1983 novel by Peter Ackroyd. It takes the form of a fictional diary written by Oscar Wilde. Ackroyd's second novel, it won the 1984 Somerset Maugham Award for authors under the age of 35.

Contents

Plot summary

The novel is written in the form of a diary which Oscar Wilde was writing in Paris in 1900, up to his death. The diary itself is completely fictional, as is the detail contained, although the events and most of the characters (such as the characters of Lord Alfred Douglas, Robert Ross and the Earl of Rosebery and his incarceration, at Pentonville, later Reading) are real. In this diary he looks back at his life, writing, and ruin through trial and gaol. Included are fairy tales much like those Wilde wrote, although again these are wholly Ackroyd's invention. The last pages are written in the character of Maurice, Wilde's valet.

Reception and analysis

In 1984, the novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for authors under the age of 35. [1] [2] The Glasgow Herald, which called it "brilliant and moving", [3] singled it out as a novel missing from the Booker Prize shortlist. [4]

In 2005, looking back at Ackroyd's career to date, The Guardian noted that the novel displays "a gift for literary ventriloquism that would become something of a signature style" [5] In 2019, S.J. Parris described Ackroyd as the master of writing "convincingly in the language of the past without going full hey-nonny-nonny" and this novel as a pitch-perfect imitation of period dialogue. [6]

It has been the subject of a number of critical works, focussing on it as an example of postmodernism and as an example of fictional biography, especially fictional biographies of Wilde. [7] [8] Martin Middeke finds that the work functions as a novel "that masterly performs all elements of postmodern fiction", as a detailed, carefully researched account of Wilde's life, and as "a pastiche of the highest quality, a brilliant stylistic imitation of Wilde's witty, paradoxical and ironic style". [9] Laura Savu notes "the heterogeneity and complexity of his writing, which justifies labels as diverse as postmodern, neo-Gothic, metaphysical-detective, and historiographic metafictional". [10]

References

  1. ↑ O'Mahony, John (2 July 2004). "Profile: Peter Ackroyd". The Guardian.
  2. ↑ "Somerset Maugham Awards". Society of Authors. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
  3. ↑ Linklater, John (16 April 1983). "Wilde with Conviction". The Glasgow Herald: 8.
  4. ↑ Linklater, John (26 October 1983). "Step Right Up for the Booker Circus". Glasgow Herald: 9.
  5. ↑ Anthony, Andrew (4 September 2005). "The Big Life". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
  6. ↑ Parris, S.J. (5 October 2019). "Book clinic: can you recommend enjoyable historical fiction?". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 July 2025.
  7. ↑ Kirby, Joris (2013). "From Wilde to Oscar: A Study in Person in Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), C. Robert Holloway's The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde (1997) and Merlin Holland's Coffee with Oscar Wilde (2007)". In Magid, Annette M. (ed.). Wilde’s Wiles: Studies of the Influences on Oscar Wilde and His Enduring Influences in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge Scholars Publising. ISBN   978-1-4438-4328-7.
  8. ↑ Dobson, Eleanor (2016). "The Ghost of Oscar Wilde: Fictional Representations". In Fleischhack, Maria; Schenkel, Elmar (eds.). Ghosts - or the (Nearly) Invisible: Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media. Peter Lang AG.
  9. ↑ Middeke, Martin (2002). "Oscar, the Proto-Postmodern? Peter Ackroyd's 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde'". In Hibbard, Julie A.; Corballis, Richard; Böker, Uwe (eds.). The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde During the Last 100. Rodopi. ISBN   9789042014008.
  10. ↑ Savu, Laura E. (2009). "Testamentary Fictions: Revisiting Peter Ackroyd's 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde' and 'Chatterton'". Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN   9780838641811.
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