Sturgis is readier than most to admire his poetry.

At Trinity College Dublin he excelled at Greek before moving to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his academic success continued and he won the Newdigate prize for poetry. His father was a liberal-minded Dublin surgeon his literary mother presided over “conversaziones” where clever talk was all. Wilde fans will have to be patient through the long chapters about his privileged Irish upbringing and academic prowess. Sturgis’s account is fuller and in some ways more reliable. Though better written than competing works, it is necessarily unsatisfactory. Richard Ellmann, author of magisterial lives of WB Yeats and James Joyce, died before he could revise thoroughly his life of Wilde, published in 1987. So it is impossible to think about Wilde’s work without biography, and there is room for a new one. Thus it was in his own day, when his conversation at society gatherings was a kind of performance art. (He died, destitute in Paris, aged 46.) His life is part of his work. His trial and imprisonment for “gross indecency” in 1895 have made him a secular martyr, publicly humiliated and savagely punished for the sin of his homosexuality. Wilde’s literary status is complicated, and is entangled with the story of his life. At the opening of his compendious new biography of Wilde, Matthew Sturgis, dazzled by his author’s continuing celebrity, declares: “Among British writers he stands with Shakespeare and Jane Austen.” Rupert Everett’s recent incarnation of him in the biopic The Happy Prince, which he also wrote and directed, is yet another confirmation of his status.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, in its own day regarded by some as poisonous (WH Smith refused to stock it), is an A-level set text. In university English departments, his writing is solemnly analysed for its prescient sexual dissidence. Once, only The Importance of Being Earnest was regularly performed, but now his other three comedies are frequently staged. O scar Wilde’s stock has never been higher.

Oscar wilde biographie richard ellmann