The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts

Visiting the British Museum’s collection of manuscripts was at the top of my list of things to see on my first trip to England, in 1979. The collection was still housed in the actual museum, in Bloomsbury, and I remember wandering through the darkened gallery, stopping at lit glass cases to look a long time at marked up manuscript pages of books I loved. I was a new writer then, heartened by proof that Jane Austin and Charlotte Bronte hadn’t gotten things right the first time, either.

But the best thing of all was stopping at the case displaying Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” open to my favorite moment in the play, when Jack Worthing tells Lady Bracknell he’s lost his parents and she responds, “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

I couldn’t walk away!

A brilliant, witty man, who for a time had the world at his feet.

Louis Bayard’s The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts opens at the height of Wilde’s success. September, 1892. Oscar, his wife Constance, son Cyril and mother Lady Wilde are on holiday in Norfolk, England, where Constance has rented a farmhouse so he can concentrate on finishing his play, “A Woman of No Importance.” She’s irritated to learn he’s invited his friend Arthur Clifton and his new wife Florence to honeymoon there. Then the aristocratic young poet Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas appears and tension in the household builds toward the moment when Constance suddenly understands that Oscar’s heart lies elsewhere and her life will never be the same.

It's not that Oscar doesn’t love her; he does. He loves their two beautiful sons. He loves their life together, which Bayard depicts with detail and dialogue worthy of Wilde himself. He makes us feel that life teetering in the balance.

And the moment it tips.

“I can’t imagine life without you and the boys and Mama—all the old anchors,” Oscar says to Constance. “But three are times those anchors feel like anchors, and there is a shoreline in view, and it is beautiful, and it is nowhere I have ever been.”

We don’t see Oscar after he makes his choice. What follows is a brief section including letters, testimony, and the sentence passed condemning Wilde to imprisonment with two years hard labor for his homosexual relationship with Lord Douglas.

Then Constance, Cyril and Vyvyan in the aftermath.

And a last, poignant section that imagines how it might have been.

Reading The Wildes in the midst of recent presidential directives threatening the lives of lives and wellbeing of LGBTQ people made this story of lives shattered by secrecy and shame hit me harder than it might have a year ago, when I believed our country had left the worst of its ignorance and cruelty about diversity behind. I might have finished it thinking, thank god people don’t have to live this way anymore instead turning the last page with a terrible sense of foreboding.

Sadly, this wonderful novel tells a story all too likely to happen again.