Jane Austen Society of
Australia
Austen citing:
Oscar Wilde
In 1897 Oscar Wilde was nearing the end of his prison
sentence in H.M.Prison Reading. For much of his time in prison, he had
been allowed no access to books. To a man with Wilde’s passion for
literature, this was punishment indeed! It was only at the end of his
imprisonment that Wilde was able to receive some books from friends and to
write to those friends and discuss them. Always a deeply sympathetic man,
Wilde worried that his fellow prisoners did not have friends who sent such
gifts and he wrote of his concern to Robert Ross: ‘Later on, there being
hardly any novels in the prison library for the poor imprisoned fellows I
live with, I think of presenting the library with about a dozen good
novels: Stevenson’s (none here but ‘The Black Arrow’!), some of
Thackeray’s (none here), Jane Austen (none here) and some good
Dumas-pere-like books.’
In the last year of his life, when Wilde was in France,
letters from Robert Ross continued to give him great pleasure most of the
time - ‘My dear Robbie, ... Your letter is very maddening: nothing about
yourself: no details, and yet you know I love middle-class tragedies and
the little squabbles that build up family life in England. I have had
delightful letters from you quite in the style of Jane Austen.’
These are the only two references Oscar Wilde ever made
to Jane Austen in his letters, but they show an appreciation of her style
and work which is only to be expected from a man of such wit and
brilliance as Wilde.
Susannah Fullerton
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