She was a high-profile figure whose beauty was widely acknowledged, whose activities were often reported in the press, and whose appearance and outfits were monitored for the sake of an intrigued public. Ever since their marriage Oscar’s charming wife had done nothing but enhance and complement his reputation. Constance Wilde balanced her husband. She was wholesome and earnest and provided the ideal foil to his determined flamboyance.
(Franny Moyle summarising her subject in Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, page 7)

‘She could not understand me and I was bored to death with the married life – but she had some sweet points in her character and was wonderfully loyal to me.
(Wilde summarising his wife to his first gay lover and lifelong confidante Robbie Ross)

As we know, the book market changes to reflect changes in society and culture. For some time now there’s been a feminist market for books about ignored, overlooked and suppressed women, the women history forgot, the women written out of the record – books which boldly proclaim that now, at last, their voices can be heard, their true stories told!

• Stories About Women Who Changed The World

An easy-to-understand subset of this is that, wherever there’s been a man eminent in any field who historians and fellow professionals have noted and praised, there’s now a well-developed and profitable market for books about the woman behind the man. Quite regularly this wife or lover is now credited with much of the man’s achievement, facts which have, up to this moment, been erased from the record but now the truth can be told! Often (to paraphrase Wilde) these revisionist accounts are even true!

Very much in this spirit comes ‘Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde’, researched and written by former TV executive Franny Moyle. It tells the life story of Constance Mary Lloyd, from her birth on 2 January 1858 to her early death on 7 April 1898 (aged just 40) dwelling, of course, on her ill-fated marriage to one of the most notorious figures in English literature.

Horace Lloyd

Constance was the daughter and second child of Horace Lloyd, an Anglo-Irish barrister, and Adelaide Barbara Atkinson (Ada), who had married in 1855 in Dublin, when Ada was just 18 and he was 8 years her senior. Constance was born in London where her father had moved his legal practice and family.

Moyle tells us unflattering things about both her parents: Horace Lloyd was a fast-living womaniser, part of the Prince of Wales’s set, strongly suspected of having more than one illegitimate child. Adelaide (Ada) was ‘a selfish and difficult woman’. Horace died in 1874 when Constance was 16 and his death heralded a devastating deterioration in her life. Her mother began to abuse and insult her with a steady stream of insulting and sarcastic comments, snubs and public humiliations. Moyle quotes accounts by her brother Otho (2 years older than Constance) bleakly describing the insults and abuse she was subjected to. As you might expect this made Constance shy and nervous and lay behind the ill health and insomnia which dogged her youth. It also explains why, in adult life, she found herself attracted to older women (not sexually, just emotionally) and had a succession of older women she referred to as mother (including Wilde’s mother, Speranza).

William Wilde

Meanwhile, the Wilde family had troubles of its own. Oscar Wilde had been born to the eminent Dublin surgeon Sir William Wilde and his wife Jane Elgée (‘the fiery poet and Irish nationalist’, who wrote under the nom de plume Speranza) four years earlier than Constance (1854) but the Wilde family had similar tribulations. William Wilde also sowed plenty of wild oats, fathering a number of illegitimate children via different mothers. Apparently he already had three illegitimate children when he married.

In the year of Oscar’s birth (1854) he started an affair with the 19-year-old daughter of a doctor colleague, Mary Travers, which was to last a decade. But when Sir William tried to end the affair, Mary was furious, put the word about that he had raped her, wrote a pamphlet denouncing him and then triggered a libel trial in which she was able to list every detail of the affair. She lost the case but a traumatised and humiliated Sir William retreated to the west coast of Ireland and never recovered. He died in 1876 while Oscar was at Oxford. Wilde – extra-marital affairs – the courts – all very prophetic.

So you can see that Wilde had plenty of personal experience when he wrote, in his essays and plays, about the gross hypocrisy of the British, who put on a respectable bourgeois facade, denouncing the kind of plays and stories which he wrote as ‘immoral’, while all the time having multiple affairs and numerous children out of wedlock.

And you can also see why this is a very enjoyable book, because it is full of gossipy stories like these. It immerses you in the family backgrounds of both its lead players as well as their extensive social lives, the network of relations and family friends that everybody socialised with in those days.

It also has one very big selling point which is that Moyle had access to the archive of Constance’s letters. A surprising number of these survive and barely a page goes by without extensive quotes from them, describing her teens, her life as a young woman ‘coming out’ in London, and then her engagement and marriage to Oscar.

Thus we get the story of Constance’s life and, from the age of about 20, her slowly escalating courtship of Oscar, very largely in her own words, via letters to her brother, mother, other family members, and some to Oscar himself.

Constance and Oscar

She and Oscar were pushed towards each other by their mothers, Lady Wilde keen to get Oscar married and settled, Ada Lloyd imagining Oscar was a successful young writer who would settle the daughter she resented and disliked. What I didn’t understand is that both matriarchs knew the other family was on hard times so it’s neither can have expected relief for their own money troubles. Surely Oscar should have held out for one of the American heiresses that he met on his famous lecture tour of the States (January 1882 to February 1883). In the event Constance supplied the money via a financial deal with her grandfather whereby she was given some of the money he was going to give her in his will, in advance before dying and leaving her the rest of the lump sum (p.100). Oscar didn’t marry rich, but he married comfortable.

The key to their relationship

It was also something to do with the fact that the Lloyd and Wilde households had not been very far apart in 1860s Dublin and the neighbourly contact continued when they all moved to London. At one point Moyle makes the best speculation as to what drew Oscar and Constance together which is that, having known her and her family since he was a boy, Oscar could drop his guard with her. He could speak to her quite frankly and naturally without putting on the pontificating pose and tone he adopted for almost everyone else.

This fact – that she was the one person he could be quite frank and natural with – explains why he was prepared to overlook her conventionality. The latter is crystallised in a letter which Moyle charitably says is carrying on a ‘debate’ about the nature of art but which Constance reveals herself to be as absolutely conventional as possible.

‘I am afraid you and I disagree in our opinion on art, for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality whilst you say they are distinct and separable things.’ (p.71)

Reading that makes you wonder if she ever understood what came to be the quite complicated, wide-ranging and deeply worked-out theories of art which Oscar expounded in the essays in Intentions (1891). On the evidence here, she isn’t even on the same planet.

And yet her account makes it absolutely clear that both partners were genuinely, deeply head-over-heels in love. Oscar wrote letters to all and sundry gushing about his beautiful bride-to-be and, once married, praised the state of matrimony to all his friends till they got bored of it.

But all the time, in parallel to the love, went worry about money. Oscar’s main source of income was the endless lecture tours he undertook, first the famous one across America, but even when back in England, he was regularly away for long stretches on tours of the north or Wales.

Moyle’s narrative goes into minute and fascinating detail about the couple’s finances. Despite making money from his American tour and a little from his first few plays, Oscar was still burdened with debts from his Oxford days, not to mention trying to help out his mother who was living in increasingly straitened circumstances in a pokey apartment in Mayfair: nice address, shame about the shabby little rooms. Oscar worked hard to maintain everyone.

Constance’s achievements

Moyle makes a very decent fist of talking up her protagonist’s interests and achievements.

Apostle of aestheticism

Moyle describes Constance’s association with the Aestheticism which became fashionable at the end of the 1870s. Once she is married to Oscar she becomes a leading figure in the movement, supervising the interior furnishing of their home at number 6 Tite Street, as well as becoming famous or notorious for her adventurous clothes. She was widely greeted as an appropriate partner for Wilde as they jointly attended the theatre and art galleries, putting on a joint aesthetic front. They were acknowledged in society and the Press as a cultural power couple (p.93). Their ‘at homes’ became famous (p.126). The (lesbian) author Marie Corelli saw a lot of the couple and wrote a mocking portrait of them as the Elephant and the Fairy (pp.151 to 153).

Wedding

Many of her outfits are described in very great detail including her wedding dress (page 87). (The wedding took place on 29 May 1884 at St James’s Church, Sussex Gardens, with a detailed description of the wedding dress, what the bridesmaids wore, and the wedding ring Oscar designed for her, p.87.) Descriptions of dress pages 93 to 98.

Rational Dress Association

Constance’s focus on clothes led her to get involved with the movement for more ‘rational’ wear for ladies, the Rational Dress Society (pp. 109 to 111, 142 to 154). Along with other progressive and feminist women, she campaigned for an end to the absurdly constrictive Victorian womenswear. Constance presided over meetings of the Rational Dress Society (RDS) and in April 1888 edited the first issue of its magazine (pages 142 to 144).

Acting

In letters to her brother Constance speculates about going on the stage. Via Oscar she had become friends with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry who he praised in his reviews and who they socialised with. She had a minor part in an ‘authentic’ production of the Greek tragedy, Helena in Troas, and looked very fetching but nothing further came of it (pages 112 to 114). She wrote theatre reviews for the Lady’s Pictorial (p.130).

Writing

Meanwhile she had been pursuing a writing career of her own. When Oscar took over the editorship of The Woman’s World magazine, Constance contributed articles on her specialist subject of rational clothes. But in a completely different vein, in 1888 she also produced a volume of children’s stories she had heard from her grandmother, called There Was Once (p.133 to 138).

Moyle devotes a couple of pages to the speculation, based on recently discovered manuscripts, that Constance may have written Wilde’s fairy story, ‘The Selfish Giant’ (pages 136 to 137). Characteristically the main evidence for this is that the story is less well written and contains blunter Christian moralising than Wilde’s other tales.

Politics

Moyle shows us how active Constance was in a variety of organisations and bodies, most focused around the ruling Liberal Party. She was a member of the Women’s Liberal Association and the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Movement. She supported Gladstone’s position on Irish Home Rule and went further. She made speeches at conferences. Her confidence and articulacy bloomed. Moyle devotes a few pages to showing how Constance was instrumental in the campaign to get the first women elected to the London County Council. She was at the heart of a lot of feminist and early suffragette activity. She dragged Oscar to Hyde Park to support the dockworkers strike of 1889. She helped to set up a women-only club, The Pioneer.

Spiritualism

This feminism and intellectual curiosity spilled over into an advanced interest in ‘spirituality’, all the rage in the last decades of the nineteenth century (pages 164 to 177). She was initiated into the secretive organisation, The Golden Dawn, whose initiation ceremony Moyle describes. After a while she dropped out of the order but maintained her interest in the subject, a few years later joining the Society for Psychical Research (p.176).

Photography

In her last years, especially in exile on the Continent, Constance developed an interest in photography, which Moyle describes a couple of times. However, taking photos of your family and children doesn’t really make you a pioneer.

In fact Moyle can’t overcome several problems. The main one is that despite all these attempts to make her sound exciting, and despite her involvement in all these causes, nonetheless Constance, in her letters, in her own words, often comes over as disappointingly conventional. Her letters portray her as a conventional Victorian lady who fusses and frets over family affairs, parties and gossip, as well as the endless money troubles the Lloyd family experienced after their dissolute father’s death, rarely rising above a very mundane, run-of-the-mill tone.

Plain

Oscar’s letters rave about Constance’s beauty but it is difficult to reconcile this with the few paintings and many photos of her we have. Moyle says she was self conscious and camera shy and it shows. She managed to look dour with a pronounced down-turning of the mouth, in more or less every photo ever taken of her.

Constance Lloyd in 1883

Clumsy

Constance had a tendency to clumsiness and misadventure when it came to everyday life. Throughout her life she was known for losing umbrellas or purses or losing things. (p.84)

Oscar bought her a pet marmoset to keep her company while he was away on his endless lecturing and she managed to kill it within a few weeks (p.84). Other examples pp.133 and 260 where she was tasked with carving a chicken but ended up dropping it on the floor.

Constance and Oscar’s prose

Oscar’s prose (in a letter to Lillie Langtry):

I am going to be married to a beautiful young girl called Constance Lloyd, a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop to listen to her…. (p.80)

Constance’s prose (in a letter to Oscar):

My darling love, I am sorry I was so silly: you take all my strength away, I have no power to do anything but just love you when you are with me & I cannot fight against my dread of you going away. Every day that I see you, every moment that you are with me, I worship you more, my whole life is yours to do as you will with it, such a poor gift to offer up to you but yet all I have and you will not despise it. I know it is only for 3 days but – it is the wrench of the parting that is so awful and you are so good to me that I cannot bear to be an hour away from you… (p.78)

Now it’s not a very fair comparison because Oscar is self-consciously performing for a high cultural figure while Constance is writing a private love letter to her fiancé. Nonetheless, it’s a good indication of the vast gulf between Oscar’s hard-won performative prose and Constance’s naive schoolgirl gushing.

It also belies Moyle’s insistence that Constance was a feminist revolutionary keen to overthrow gender stereotypes. In this and most of her writing and behaviour around her marriage and children, Constance was the embodiment of gender stereotyping. Compare a letter she wrote to a friend after Oscar’s imprisonment:

‘By sticking to him now I may save him from even worse…I think we women were meant to be comforters and I believe that no-one can really take my place now or help him as I can.’ (quoted page 282)

‘I think we women were meant to be comforters’ – not that feminist or revolutionary, and most of her letters display the same attitudes.

Children and schism

Constance undertook all these activities while being pregnant, bearing and raising two children, Cyril (born 5 June 1885) and Vyvyan (3 November 1886). As a modern man I don’t underestimate the effort, sickness, discomfort and risk involved in each of these pregnancies. Interestingly, Moyle tells us that Constance took advantage of the latest thinking about childbirth which was to anaesthetise the mother when she was in labour so that the child was delivered while she was unconscious (p.106).

The Wildes are described as doting parents. His children remember Oscar happily getting down on his hands and knees to join in with their games. But there were straws in the wind.

1) Vyvyan

Both parents wanted the second child to be a girl and were disappointed when Vyvyan was born. Unlike Cyril he was a weakly sickly child and was treated differently from Cyril who was very obviously his parents’ favourite (p.115).

2) Pregnancies

Moyle believes the second pregnancy and birth were problematic, though no record survives. Alas the physical changes the two births caused to her body had a very negative effect on Wilde (p.123). Moyle includes a letter from Oscar to a friend lamenting that he now found Constance – who thrilled him with her physical beauty two short years earlier, who he referred to as Artemis – repellent and disgusting and it was an effort to touch or kiss her. Poor Constance.

3) Oscar’s absences

Moyle points out that when Oscar returned from his American lecture tour he threw himself into a gruelling series of unending lecture tours around the UK and this meant he was often away from her, often for long periods i.e. their relationship right from the start included Oscar’s absences. When these lecture tours came to an end and Oscar settled down to be a) a family man and b) the more regular office job of editing a magazine, he rankled at the lack of travel and novelty. Quite quickly he reverted to the nearest he could get which was routinely going out without Constance, something she lamented but got used to (for example, even on his honeymoon, p.91).

4) Oscar and danger

Moyle also brings out how Oscar was always attracted by danger and the seedy side of life. He enjoyed being taken by friends who knew about them, to the worst slums, to the drinking dens of Docklands and so on. In this he was at one with the cultural mood of the times which was becoming more and more interested in in the gritty realities of poverty and squalor. Wilde insisted on visiting criminal dens in Paris on his honeymoon (p.91).

Wilde deprecated the scientific Naturalism of Zola and his school but was as fascinated by low life as them; just that in his hands it acquires a ‘romantic’ mystique, most obviously in the passage in Dorian Gray where the protagonist takes a hansom cab way out East to drinking and opium dens down by the docks. There was nothing massively new in this. Dickens depicted the hypnotic thrill of criminal lowlives and purulent slums in many of his novels.

As to his sex life, Moyle tells us that up to and including the first years of his marriage, Wilde routinely used female sex workers, especially on trips to Paris with his heterosexual friend Robert Sherrard (p.79). This kind of thing also comes under the heading ‘Oscar’s interest in the sordid side of life’, with Wilde fascinated by bordellos and brothels well before he began any homosexual activity.

Writing about Wilde, especially by gay critics, routinely refers to his ‘double life’ in terms of his concealed homosexuality as if this was a great achievement, a bold gay rebellion against Victorian values – but millions of Victorian men led ‘double lives’ with heterosexual sex workers and they are routinely labelled hypocrites (p.124). In the eyes of feminists and posterity these straight men are horrible exploiters. It’s a mark of our own double or dubious standards that when Wilde began to use male prostitutes, he became a queer icon. There was much more of a continuum of exploitation in Wilde’s sex life, from female prostitutes to male prostitutes to boys. Categorising Wilde or anyone’s sex life in simplistic binary terms seems to me factually and morally wrong. We’re all on the spectrum, on numerous spectrums…

Robbie Ross

Moyle describes the arrival of the 17-year-old Robert Ross in Oscar’s life. Despite being so young, Robbie was precociously experienced in homosexual sex and social practices. Moyle repeats the rumour that Oscar first met Ross in a public convenience where the boy propositioned the older man. He was welcomed to Oscar’s home and became good friends with Constance. In fact he was just one of many young men whose adulation Oscar encouraged, including students at Oxford and Cambridge. It’s unclear how much of this was homosexual and how much was narcissism.

I’m not going to repeat the stories of Wilde’s gay experiments, cruising and rent boys. From the perspective of this book, what’s interesting is Constance’s reaction which is that she didn’t know about it. She thought Oscar liked surrounding himself with youthful adorers (which was indeed true) but when he disappeared on absences and his affections seemed directed elsewhere, Constance thought it was to a woman and Moyle details the several women Constance was jealous of. In fact, in the period 1887 to 1889 Moyle calculates that Wilde had six homosexual lovers (p.181).

The Portrait of Mr W.H.

It’s striking that Frank Harris thought it was the publication of Wilde’s essay-dialogue about the disputed identity of the muse of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’, in the July 1889 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine, which began the ruin of his reputation. Up till then he had been a well-known figure of fun in London Society and the Press, portrayed as a workshy, effeminate fop. But he worked on the ‘Portrait’ with Robbie Ross as ‘a barely concealed apology for homosexual love’ (p.179). Friends and colleagues in the literary world advised against publishing it but Wilde went ahead and it marked a change in tone of the attacks on him, from cheerful satire to beginning to detect ‘immoral tendencies’. As we know, this would snowball.

Separate lives

By the end of 1889 the pair were living separate lives. Oscar often stayed out at hotels for nights on end, allegedly to concentrate on his writing, in reality to entertain streams of young men. There were arguments and recriminations. Constance developed a close friendship with another older woman, Georgina Cowper-Temple (vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist) the latest in a line of mother figures (‘I turn to you for love and claim a Mother’s love because I need it so desperately’). Georgina lived nearby, in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, but also owned a big house on the coast at Babbacombe which was a shrine to pre-Raphaelite taste.

She also brought with her a passion for devout Christianity. As she felt more isolated in her private life (and worn down with concern for her dissolute brother Otho) Constance developed an intense late-Victorian Christian devoutness. She started attending church every day, making notes on sermons.

All this suited Oscar as it allowed him to pursue his own life, not just sex but all the socialising and schmoozing, the dinners and openings and whatnot required of someone trying to sustain a career as a freelance writer in London.

Moyle’s account of these years seen from Constance’s perspective are fascinating. As a general summary what comes over is that Oscar, despite long absences – for example months spent in Paris where he was writing Salome and having gay affairs – he continued to write regular letters to Constance full of the most loving endearments. Like a lot of women, Moyle struggles with the notion that a man can have sex with someone else and yet still love his wife, but that’s what Wilde appeared to do. Or he preserved one type or mode of love for her and the family life she created for him; other, most passionate and excitingly transgressive modes were expressed elsewhere. Human beings are complex.

Anyway, although they were now mostly living apart – with Constance taking holidays at friends’ houses around the UK – Oscar still sent her copies of his new play ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ to her and, a little later, the first copy of his next book of fairy stories, ‘A House of Pomegranates’ in November 1891 (p.199).

Enter Bosie

Bosie’s personality was twisted and difficult. Demanding and hedonistic, greedy and selfish… (p.221)

In Moyle’s account all this changes with the arrival of Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) in Wilde’s life in June 1891. The pair were introduced by poet Lionel Johnson (p.194). But it was in only a year later, in May 1892, that Bosie was being blackmailed by a fellow student at Oxford and turned to Wilde for help and Wilde brought in his trusted lawyer George Lewis, that really clinched the affair. By June they were lovers (p.203).

In August 1892 the family hired a farmhouse near Cromer for Wilde to complete ‘A Woman of No Importance’ only for Bosie to invite himself for a day and end up spending weeks. In the autumn Constance’s feckless brother Otho flees his creditors to the Continent to live under the family middle name of Holland (this would be the identity Constance adopted after Oscar’s disgrace).

His character and behaviour were changed by Douglas. While Constance would be staying at Babbacombe with Georgiana, Wilde was extending his network of handsome young gay friends, who themselves had contacts among regular ‘renters’ or gay sex workers. In spring 1893 she went for a break to Italy. Wilde regularly popped over to Paris, partly to supervise production of Salome, partly for gay socialising.

Bosie casually gave away the gifts Oscar lavished on him, including clothes. He gave a suit to gay compadre and unemployed clerk Alfred Wood, which still had in the pocket a candid letter Oscar had written him which Wood tried to blackmail Oscar with (p.217). While Constance was doing an Italian tour with a lady companion and improving her skills with a Kodak camera, Wilde was staging orgies and holding court among adoring young men and being blackmailed.

Nonetheless Oscar still wrote loving letters to her and Moyle points out that most biographies of him fail to take into account how attached he remained to her right till the end.

Oscar’s behaviour in every respect had changed. At the curtain call of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ (20 February 1892) he had provoked the audience not so much by ironically thanking them for their good taste nor for wearing a metal buttonhole, but for smoking as he did so, which was still regarded as impolite. At the first night of ‘A Woman of No Importance’ (19 April) 1893 most of the audience applauded but there were hisses and boos. Rumours were spreading of his transgressive lifestyle and Oscar again taunted the audience.

In June 1893 the Wildes hired a house at Goring. Bosie hired the staff who were insubordinate and sometimes drunk. For the first time Constance felt alienated. And for the first time Wilde started to be rude to her in front of others (p.211). The Belgian poet Pierre-Félix Louÿs who Oscar dedicated ‘Salome’ to cut off his friendship with Wilde when he witnessed the latter deliberately reduce Constance to tears in a hotel room in front of Bosie (p.223).

By August Wilde was exhausted by Bosie’s neediness, greed and tantrums and fled to France. Constance’s perpetual absence from Tite Street began to look like flight. Everything which warmed the first few years of their marriage had ended. On the rare occasions either returned there it felt an abandoned shell.

In the letters we have of hers, the ones she sent friends such as Georgina, she commonly refers to Oscar’s absences or holidays due to him being unwell. Moyle floats the theory that Constance may have been advised by one or more friends or doctors that Oscar’s homosexuality was an illness which could be cured. Alternatively, it might have been a comforting way of hiding from herself and others what she either suspected or knew to be true i.e. he had fallen out of love with her and in love with a disastrous young man.

Later Moyle quotes a letter where Constance describes herself as a ‘hero worshipper’. Nowadays maybe she’d be called a people pleaser. She had set Oscar up on such a high pedestal maybe she was just psychologically incapable of taking him down again.

Finally Wilde fled Bosie to Paris and, according to De Profundis, on the train there realised what a mess he had got his life into. He wrote to Bosie’s mother (who he was in regular correspondence with) suggesting that young scoundrel be sent to Egypt to join the Diplomatic Service. After hiding from Bosie for a month he returned to Tite Street and Constance in October 1893 determined to turn over a new leaf. She revived the house, hired new staff, they started attending plays together (three in one week) and reverted to being a celebrity couple. While Bosie was away from November 1893 to February 1894 all was like old times.

Then Constance made the worst mistake of her life. Bosie had been bombarding Oscar with letters to be allowed to see him again. Now he telegraphed Constance and Constance, writing that she felt it unbecoming of Oscar to ignore his friend, encouraged him to go and meet Paris. Catastrophe. As soon as they were reunited the pair fell into their old ways, ruinously expensive dining, sleeping together, posing ostentatiously. When he returned to London Oscar had reverted to being his cold self again.

Enter the Marquess of Queensbury

But a new element entered, Bosie’s almost insanely angry and vengeful father, John Sholto Douglas, the eighth Marquess of Queensbury. Queensbury began bombarding Wilde with messages telling him to cease his relationship with his son. He visited Wilde in Tite Street for a furious confrontation where Queensbury threatened to have Wilde horsewhipped and Wild threatened to shoot him. Bosie bought a pistol which he carried round with him and let off in the Berkeley Hotel, an incident covered in the newspapers which added to Wilde’s by-now seriously tarnished reputation (p.240).

I was interested to learn that in the summer of 1894 Wilde consulted a lawyer about taking out a restraining order on Queensbury or suing him for libel – in other words the step he was to take a year later. I.e. the 1895 libel action wasn’t a spontaneous act but rather the fulfilment of a long-considered one.

Constance takes the family on holiday to Worthing. At this time she conceived the idea of a book. I was prepared to be impressed by these signs of her authorial inventiveness so it felt bathetic when Moyle announces that it was to be…a book-length selection of Oscar’s best quotes, to be titled Oscariana. Not quite so original after all. But the main point is that, surprisingly, Constance seems to have fallen in with the young publisher tasked with helping to produce it, the general manager of Hatchard’s, one Arthur Humphreys. He was also trapped in an unhappy marriage and a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

During this holiday Oscar was sweet with the boys and sketched out the storyline for a play about a man who is beastly to his wife and drives her into having an affair. It was provisionally titled Constance and is evidence (or is it?) that he knew his wife had fallen in love with this Humphreys.

In any event the book was published privately the following year and the summer fling with Humphreys fizzled out.

September 1894

Anyway the Worthing idyll was ruined when Bosie invited himself to stay. In September 1894 Constance was upset by the publication of a novel satirising Oscar and his relationship with Bosie, ‘The Green Carnation’, by an author on the fringes of Oscar’s circle, Robert Hichens.

October 1894

In October Oscar stayed at the Grand Hotel Brighton with Bosie, a vacation he describes with horror in De Profundis. Meanwhile, following The Green Carnation, cartoons of Wilde and Bosie were published. On Constance and Oscar’s next visit to the theatre he was ostentatiously snubbed. December 1894 and the chickens were coming home to roost. Their checks were being bounced by the bank so they were both very anxious that Oscar’s next play, ‘An Ideal Husband’ which he was finishing that winter, would be a theatrical success.

Christmas 1894

At Christmas 1894 Constance had a fall which exacerbated her ill health. Moyle has periodically referred to her ill health, neuralgic pains in her side, being bedridden, intermittent paralysis, gout (p.10, 196).

January 1895

Premiere of ‘An Ideal Husband’. Oscar went on holiday to Algiers with Bosie.

February 1895

By 14 February, Valentine’s Day, he had returned for the first night of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest, a Trivial Comedy for Serious People’ at the St James’s Theatre. Oscar had been tipped off that the Marquess of Queensbury planned to make a speech from the stalls accusing Oscar of immoral relations with his son. He arrived with a bouquet of rotting vegetables but was prevented from entering the theatre by a cordon of police.

On 18 February Wilde arrived at his club, the Albemarle, to discover that the Marquess of Queensberry had been there a few days earlier and, finding Oscar absent, had scribbled on his card the famous words ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite’.

From here things unravelled quickly, as I’m sure you know and as is available in hundreds of accounts and at last half a dozen films. Because one or more servants at the Albemarle would have seen the accusation he couldn’t afford to ignore it: he was forced to take some action. He considered fleeing to the continent but was prevented by a very simple fact. The Avondale Hotel where he had been staying to be near the theatres where his plays were rehearsing and premiering, was owed money and had confiscated Wilde’s luggage as security (p.256).

Bosie arrived and, not thinking about Oscar’s safety, obsessed with the opportunity of putting his father, who he insensately hated, behind bars, advised Oscar to sue. When he said he had no money, Bosie (falsely) promised that he and his brother and mother would pay the court costs).

And so the well-worn story unfolded:

• how the trial of Queensbury collapsed on the first day as evidence started to emerge that Wilde was ‘a somdomite’
• how the evidence justified the public prosecutor in charging Wilde with gross indecency
• how Wilde’s first trial failed when the jury couldn’t reach a verdict
• how a second trial was held at which the jury (accurately) found him guilty of acts of gross indecency
• how the judge, on an evil day, sentenced Wilde to two years hard labour

All was carried out under due process of the law, the evidence was plain to see, the jury did their duty, the judge awarded the sentence mandated by law – and yet this just goes to show that morality and right have nothing to do with law. It still feels like one of the darkest stains on the history of what is jokingly called British justice

Anyway, this is a book about Constance. How did all this affect her? During the build-up to the trial she was once again ill. She was diagnosed incapable of walking and needed care so went to stay with her aunt Napier.

It beggars belief that Wilde and Bosie were so sure of their case that Oscar let himself be persuaded to take the young egotist to Monte Carlo. Not only did they parade themselves in the most talked-about spot in Europe, but their holiday à deux was widely reported in the British press and could only confirm in the public mind all the Marquess’s accusations.

25 March 1895

Oscar and Bosie return to Britain.

28 March 1895

Trial date set for 3 April. While the pair had been gallivanting the Marquess of Queensbury had hired private detectives who had done an impressive job tracking down and getting evidence from an impressive number of Wilde’s gay sexual contacts.

1 April 1895

Constance’s last act for Oscar as a free man was to agree to accompany him and Bosie to the theatre, in a vain attempt, far too late, to rehabilitate his reputation or at least to put on a united front. So on the night of 1 April 1895 Constance put on one of her best outfits and the three of them arrived by carriage at the St James’s Theatre for a performance of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ determined to face down the mob. It’s hard for us to understand why Wilde clung on to Bosie’s company right to the last, and even harder to understand why Constance agreed to go with him and Bosie. Surely she should have insisted that just she and Oscar go as a couple in order to present a happy heterosexual face to the world.

3 April 1895

Wilde’s libel trial against Queensbury begins. By 5 April it has collapsed as the Marquess’s lawyers presented a litany of evidence proving Wilde’s homosexual associations with a long list of young men and male prostitutes.

24 April 1895

The entire contents of Tite street, all the family belongings, were sold at auction to pay Oscar’s creditors. Some things were simply stolen. Constance had kept all of Oscar’s letters to her in a blue binder. This vanished and all the letters with it.

26 April 1895

Start of the first trial, Oscar and Alfred Taylor charged with 25 counts of gross indecency and conspiracy to procure acts of indecency. Within a week it collapsed as the jury failed to agree a verdict. Oscar was allowed out on bail (provided by the Reverend Stewart Headlam). All his friends begged him to flee abroad. No hotel would have him so he stayed with his friend Ada Leverson. Constance visited him once and pleaded with him to flee. Like a fool he refused.

20 May 1895

Second trial begins. On 25 May he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to two years hard labour.

During Oscar’s imprisonment

Moyle shows how Constance’s friends and acquaintances divided, most sticking by her but some blaming her for being a bad wife in letting her husband carry on like this. Friends who visited described her as the most miserable woman in London. To her rescue came Edward Burne-Jones’s son, Philip, who offered her clear legal and financial advice. Moyle’s account shows how Constance’s behaviour was consistently motivated by concern to protect her children and secure their futures.

Money

The central point was that, if she were to die, all her money, property and income would revert to Oscar who, on the record of the past five years, would blow it all on his improvident lover leaving Cyril and Vyvyan with nothing. The key goal then, was to legally and financially separate from Oscar.

Name

At the same time, now that the Wilde name was irretrievably ruined and a curse on all who bore it, the best thing would be to change her and especially the children’s names. This she did, adopting the family name of Holland for herself and the two boys in October 1895 (p.284)

Exile

And, seeing as the lease on Tite Street had run out, all its contents had been auctioned off in the 24 April fire sale, there was nothing to stop her from going to live abroad and changing her name, which is what she did. Through her own family, but especially via Oscar, she had become good friends with some of the posh Brits who preferred to live abroad (notably Margaret Brooke, the Ranee of Sarawak, p.283).

She (and the boys) had already got used to a life largely lived moving around, staying with wealthy friends, at other people’s houses, sometimes at hotels. Now she shifted this way of life to the Continent and the last few chapters detail the impressive number of locations Constance lived at, sometimes with the boys, sometimes sending them to stay with relatives, or to boarding schools (in Germany), sometimes with her brother Otho, whose rackety life and second marriage had fallen down the social scale so that he was renting a few rooms in a house shared with the landlord.

June 1895 Glion near Lake Geneva

September 1895 Otho’s chalet in Bevaix

November 1895 Sori, outside Nervi on the Italian Riviera, to be near Brooke

Christmas 1895 Genoa for the operation

April 1896 Heidelberg

In her last year Constance divided her time between Heidelberg, Nervi and Bevaix. For a while she stayed with the Ranee of Sarawak at her villa, the Villa Ruffo.

September 1897 Villa Elvira, Bogliasco, near Nervi

Oscar and Constance

The story of Constance and Oscar’s relationship in the three years between his conviction (May 1895) and her death (April 1898) is complicated but makes for fascinating reading. She visited him in prison twice, first time on 21 September 1895, and was appalled at his condition, second time in order to be the person to tell him that his beloved mother, Speranza, had died in February 1896. She made him an offer to pay him (from her own straitened funds) £150 a year on his release. Basically, she continued to be a doggedly loyal and loving wife but was sorely tried and, eventually, alienated by the behaviour of Oscar’s advisers and friends.

One aspect of this was money. To recoup the costs of the trial Queensbury had forced Wilde into bankruptcy, compelling him to attend the Bankruptcy Court, in his prison outfit, on 24 September and again on 12 November. Here his debts were announced as £3,591 (most of which had been lavished on Bosie). What assets remained were placed in the hands of the Official Receiver. One of these was a life interest in Constance’s private income. Legally, this interest was now available to anyone to buy and it was to become a bitter bone of contention between the couple. Because Constance, not unreasonably, considered it hers, whereas Oscar’s advisers advised him to buy it so as to guarantee him some income.

Their rival bid in the spring of 1896 blocked her own (p.293). Robbie Ross wrote to explain that they were taking this step because they’d heard that Queensbury himself was bidding to buy it, but it felt to Constance like yet another betrayal. Advisors on both side became increasingly suspicious of the other side’s intentions. Constance became paranoid that their next move would be to legally remove the boys from her care, which she was prepared to fight tooth and nail.

The situation deteriorated until Constance instructed her solicitor to write Wilde a blunt letter telling him to do as she wanted or she would divorce him, the life interest would become null and void, and she would gain sole custody of the children. By now, a year into his sentence, Wilde was in very poor shape mentally and physically.

Under the false impression that his friends had gathered a sizeable fund to support him after his release he decided to play hardball and, in December 1896, told his solicitor to demand both the life interest and an increased dole of £200 per annum from Constance.

This was the last straw and Constance initiated legal proceedings which, on 12 February, awarded her custody of the children along with ‘a responsible person’. She named her neighbour from Tite Street, Adrian Hope, who she also made the sole beneficiary of her will.

Interestingly, though, her plans to divorce Oscar were stymied. It turned out that she should have done it straight after the trial and cited the legal evidence revealed in the trial as her grounds. By delaying for 18 months she had, in legal terms, condoned his offences and they could no longer be used as grounds for divorce. To divorce Oscar now she would have to bring a new court case which would probably require reviving much of the evidence from his trial. This, understandably, made her pause.

In April 1897 Wilde was preparing for his release and realised what a fool he’d been. He realised with a thump that his friends had not gathered a fund for him to live on, and that he would be almost completely dependent on Constance’s goodwill which his allies had, regrettably, alienated.

The net result of all these negotiations and misunderstandings was that in the month of his release, May 1895, Wilde was forced to sign a legal agreement with Constance’s solicitors agreeing to a) a legal separation b) the life insurance assigned entirely to Constance c) Constance agreeing an annual stipend of £150. This latter was dependent on Oscar not mixing with ‘disreputable people’ meaning, of course, Bosie. Oscar was humiliated but forced to sign it.

The year after prison

Wilde was released from prison on 20 May 1897. Constance died on 7 April 1898. In those 12 months the following happened. On the day of his release he took the boat train to France and took rooms in the Channel village of Berneval-sur-Mer. Oscar and she corresponded. Oscar invited her and the boys to come and meet him but she prevaricated. Partly this was because the boys were in boarding schools but partly the deterioration in her health.

Moyle describes this as a big mistake. A grand gesture was called for, a magnanimous reunion and mutual forgiveness. Instead Constance’s failure to reply left the weak and vulnerable Oscar open to the importunities of others chief among whom was, of course, Bosie. After taking the boys for a summer holiday to the Black Forest Constance moved into a new villa outside Nervi and began preparing it for Oscar’s visit and the Grand Reconciliation.

Imagine her horror when she received a letter from him asking the visit date to be put back till October (when the boys would be back at school) and stamped as coming from Naples. Naples! Notorious haunt of the person Constance now calls ‘the dreadful person’. It seemed to Constance that the nightmare had returned: Oscar had fallen back into his old addiction. He had chosen Bosie over her and over his sons. He was ‘as weak as water’. For the first time she snapped, her love broke. She realised she didn’t sympathise with his weakness. Now she despised him.

She wrote him a stern letter which doesn’t survive but we have then letter Wilde wrote in response to Robbie. This includes the very telling lines:

Women are so petty and Constance has no imagination. Perhaps for revenge she will have another trial: then she may claim to have for the first time in her life influenced me.

This is a revealing indication of Wilde’s true unadorned opinion of her. Meanwhile Constance had snapped and wanted nothing more to do with him. He had breached the terms of their legal agreement and so she cut off her allowance to him.

Christmas came and went with presents from friends. She went to see Vyvyan in Monaco. In January she learned that Wilde and Bosie had separated. In February she received a copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and was moved by it. She asked a mutual friend Carlos Blacker to find out where Oscar was. He tracked Oscar down to a cheap hotel in Paris and found a broken, querulous man who was only interested in cadging money. Moyle quotes a long letter which lays bare the money situation which was that Constance herself had very little and was still trying to pay off Oscar’s borrowings to old friends and so would now never give him money directly, but only pay his bills directly to the landlord of whichever hotel he was holed up in. He was utterly untrustworthy with money.

Constance’s death

I knew that Constance died before Wilde but maybe the biggest surprise of the entire book was the revelation that her doctors killed her in a botched operation.

Moyle has prepared the way by telling us all through the book about Constance’s poor health – gout, neuralgia, back and arm pains, partial paralysis and so on – and her occasional hints that there was a gynaecological aspect to her illness, though no details survive. (Elsewhere I have read the view that these were the symptoms of multiple sclerosis – and that ‘The second doctor was an Italian, Luigi Maria Bossi, who somehow thought that neurological and mental illness could be cured with gynaecological operations’ – etinkerbell. Moyle is nowhere as explicit this and doesn’t mention the multiple sclerosis diagnosis anywhere.)

Anyway, at Christmas 1895 she had gone to see a Dr Bossi, a gynaecologist in Genoa. This man claimed he could cure the creeping paralysis of her left side with an operation. She underwent an operation just before Christmas 1895, took a month to recuperate, but then did feel better.

Then a lot of water under the bridge, as summarised above. And then, in April 1897, she went to see Bossi again. On 2 April she underwent another operation. Moyle says the details are unclear. There is mention of the creeping paralysis, of tumours and the renewed hint of something gynaecological. She survived the operation but the paralysis accelerated and eventually stopped her heart. She had written to her brother and the Ranee to come see her but neither made it in time.

Otho blamed the doctors. He wrote to Lady Mount-Temple that the Italian doctor heading the clinic had suddenly mysteriously gone abroad. Nobody had told Constance how serious the operation might be. Friends and doctors in England had advised against an operation. They were right but then again, they weren’t the ones suffering from creeping paralysis and desperate to fix it.

Oscar was devastated. He wrote to Blacker ‘If only we had met once and kissed.’ If only Constance had made the effort to go see him in Dieppe, maybe he wouldn’t have fallen back in with Bosie, maybe they would have patched something up, she wouldn’t have cut off his allowance, he would have prevented her having the fatal operation.

Constance was buried on 9 April in Genoa’s Campo Santo cemetery.

Summary

I’m glad this book exists. Kudos to Franny Moyle for researching and writing it. I think she a little overeggs Constance’s achievements – in the middle sections making more of Constance’s literary or acting careers than they merit, towards the end making a big deal of her taking up photography when in fact she just appears to have taken half-decent holiday snaps, and so on.

But she doesn’t really need to. Constance’s achievements speak for themselves – being the loving supportive wife of one of the great writers of the day, decorating their house in a stunning modern style and hosting her fashionable at-homes, presenting a united aesthetic front at the theatre and art galleries, maintaining an interest in a host of causes from women’s rights and political involvement and the Liberal Federation through to the (to us) wilder reaches of spirituality, psychic research and the Golden Dawn. And much more.

It wasn’t a great life and Constance isn’t an interesting figure in any intellectual sense. Her writings are thin and her letters reveal a very run-of-the-mill, dutiful, limited and conformist personality. What evidence we have is that she hadn’t a clue about Oscar’s intellectual concerns; in no way was she anywhere near his intellectual equal. But that doesn’t matter.

Obviously being married to Oscar Wilde was a unique position, but in many other ways she’s a very representative figure of her time, particularly in her resistance to the restricted life dictated to women by the Victorian patriarchy and her restless search for other interests and activities and purposes to fill her life.

So many biographies are of kings and queens or great soldiers or great artists and so on. Constance wasn’t a great anything very much. In the end she’s remembered, like countless mothers through the ages, for her spirited defence of her children. But Moyle’s book shows us that, also like countless mothers through the ages, her life was much, much more than that.

And of course, her biography acts as a powerful corrective to the hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and half dozen movies which go on about Oscar Oscar Oscar. Their marriage had two people in it and Moyle has done a great job of bringing Mrs Oscar Wilde to life, presenting her as a sympathetic and valid person in her own right.

Coda: on biography

I’m glad I’m not famous and have achieved next to nothing in my life. Imagine 120 years after your death having all your private letters published, having every development in your private life, every mood, every emotion, every unwise word and silly decision, blazoned for all the world to read, allowing millions of complete strangers to assess and judge you. What a nightmare.

There’s something horrifying about the entire idea of biography.

Credit

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle was published by John Murray in 2011. References are to the 2012 paperback edition.

Related reviews

• Oscar Wilde reviews