Book review: Wilde’s Women

MOST books about Oscar Wilde view the events of his life in terms of his relationships with men, especially the disastrous affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, which brought about his downfall.

So author Eleanor Fitzsimons’s declared intention of writing instead about the women who surrounded him seemed an interesting proposition.

These women must of course begin with his mother, Lady Jane Wilde, known before her marriage as the poet Speranza, who published pro-Independence, anti-British poems in The Nation in the 1840s.