Truly Wilde: The Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece

by JoanSchenkar (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.39

  Born a scant three months after her uncle's notorious arrest and raised in the shadow of the greatest scandal of the turn of the twentieth century, Dorothy Irene Wilde was a born writer who never completed the the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination. Dolly Wilde made her career in the salons - and the bedrooms - of some of London and Paris's most interesting women and men. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, Dolly drenched her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs and created a sensation by apparently reliving the life of her infamous uncle. In this very modern biography, Joan Schenkar provides a fascinating look at what it means to live with the talents but not the achievements of biography's usual subjects. She aslo uncovers never-before-published evidence of the hidden life of the Wilde family and of the extraordianry salon society of Natalie Clifford Barney, Dolly Wilde's longest and most fatal attachment.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $12.55

  The story of Oscar's flamboyant niece, Dolly Wilde (1895-1941) and the notorious literary salon in Paris that she and Natalie Barney established in the 1920s. The Academie des Femmes was a sort of literary circle comprising at one time or another Colette, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Romaine Brooks. It was often visited by men too - T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau. At the heart of the salon - and this story - is the passionate love affair between Dolly and Natalie. Dolly was, like her famous uncle, a witty degenerate, brilliant and literary. In Paris, she cross-dressed as her uncle. HG Wells called her a feminine Wilde , Radclyffe Hall's lover called her much the better man .