Letters of Oscar Wilde, Volume 3 (1895-1897)

This volume captures Oscar Wilde at his most stripped bare. The years 1895 to 1897 marked his catastrophic fall from celebrated playwright to imprisoned outcast, and these letters document every agonising step of that descent. Here are the notes Wilde scribbled to the friends who refused to abandon him after his arrest, the desperate letters to lovers, and the extraordinary correspondence from his two years of hard labour in Reading Gaol. Most significant is the presence of De Profundis, the long letter Wilde composed in prison to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas: a meditation on suffering, memory, and the nature of love that ranks among the most haunting autobiographical writings in the English language. These are not the glittering epigrams of the salon or the witty plays that made his reputation. They are the raw, often desperate communications of a man confronting ruin, and they contain some of the finest prose he ever wrote. For anyone who has ever been seduced by Wilde's brilliance, this volume reveals the man behind the legend.