Literary Connections: Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde, New York, 1882

Lord Illingworth: The Book of
Life begins with a man and a
woman in a garden.
Mrs Allonby: It ends with
Revelations.
A Woman of No Importance

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, to give him his full name, was always aware of the importance of style, whether in matters of dress or in writing:

'I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.'

The plays

A Woman of No Importance (1893): see the separate page for this play.
Lady Windermere's Fan 1892 (New Mermaids edition linked here)
An Ideal Husband 1895 (Dover Thrift edition linked here)
The Importance of Being Earnest 1895 (Penguin Popular Classics linked here).

In addition, one-volume editions of these plays are also available:

The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband (Oxford World's Classics)
The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, A Florentine Tragedy (Penguin Classics)

Other works

The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde (Penguin Popular Classics edition linked: other editions are available)
De Profundis, Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings (link is to Wordsworth Classics edition)

The Ballad of Reading Gaol: Carol Rumens writes about the work in the Guardian's Poem of the Week blog.

Books on Oscar Wilde

The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde is one in a very useful series surveying current criticism.

Oscar Wilde on the Web

The Free Library has a brief biography of Wilde and copies of some of the works online, including A Woman of No Importance.
Biblio has a fuller biography, as of course does Wikipedia.
The Victorian Web is an invaluable source of information on the context. There is a whole section devoted to Wilde.
Project Gutenberg is a good place to find texts of many of Wilde's works, including most of the plays
Bartleby has the full text of Wilde's poems.
Bibliomania has The Ballad of Reading Gaol and most of Wilde's short stories.
The Oscar Wilde Collection contains most of Wilde's works; the plays are in PDF format so are not easy to adapt.