Could ever a woman have been so comprehensively forgotten by history as Constance Wilde, so aptly named or so eclipsed by her husband’s myth? In her gripping new book, Franny Moyle reclaims Constance from the dusty closet out of which Oscar so splendidly and yet so disastrously emerged.
The perhaps surprising premise of Moyle’s biography is the initial sincerity of that ill-fated union. The author is at pains to explain how heterosexual the young Wilde was, dallying with Parisian prostitutes and breaking female hearts in high society. Constance was almost a perfect match. A scion of Irish gentry with familial connections to the Wildes, she was feisty, literate, art loving and radically minded. “I am going to be married to a beautiful girl called Constance