Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

by Oscar Wilde

Overview

1. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, 2. The Canterville Ghost, 3. The Sphinx Without a Secret, 4. The Model Millionaire, 5. The Portrait of Mr. W.H.It was Lady Windermere's last reception before Easter, and Bentinck House was even more crowded than usual. Six Cabinet Ministers had come on from the Speaker's Levée in their stars and ribands, all the pretty women wore their smartest dresses, and at the end of the picture-gallery stood the Princess Sophia of Carlsrühe, a heavy Tartar-looking lady, with tiny black eyes and wonderful emeralds, talking bad French at the top of her voice, and laughing immoderately at everything that was said to her. It was certainly a wonderful medley of people. Gorgeous peeresses chatted affably to violent Radicals, popular preachers brushed coat-tails with eminent sceptics, a perfect bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima-donna from room to room, on the staircase stood several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists, and it was said that at one time the supper-room was absolutely crammed with geniuses. In fact, it was one of Lady Windermere's best nights, and the Princess stayed till nearly half-past eleven.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789387867178
Publisher:	Maven Books
Publication date:	07/01/2021
Pages:	132
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 - 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death. Wilde's parents were successful Anglo-Irish Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day.

Date of Birth:

October 16, 1854

Date of Death:

November 30, 1900

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

The Royal School in Enniskillen, Dublin, 1864; Trinity College, Dublin, 1871; Magdalen College, Oxford, England, 1874

Editorial Reviews

A well-narrated collection features five pieces of short fiction originally published in 1891, to which has been added Wilde’s mawkish fairy tale “The Birthday of the Infanta.” The anthology includes Wilde’s best-known story, “The Canterville Ghost,” a satiric and ultimately touching account of a brash American family frustrating a British ghost, and the enigmatic “Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” in which research into the identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets leads to monomania and suicide. All the selections drip with irony, paradox, and iconoclasm while showing off the author’s celebrated cleverness and wit. Narrators Rupert Degas, David Timson, and Anthony Donovan well understand and communicate these qualities. In addition, they mercifully tone down the instances of excessive sentiment that could otherwise tumble them into bathos. Y.R. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2011 - AudioFile