The Happy Prince and Other Stories

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, followed by Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to advocate for the Aesthetic Movement, also known as “Art for Art’s Sake.”

Despite earning a first-class degree and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde was unsuccessful in securing an Oxford scholarship. He subsequently supported himself through lecturing and writing for periodicals. After marrying Constance Lloyd in 1884, he attempted to establish himself as an author, but initially with limited success.

However, his collections of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), along with his novella Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891) and his sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually earned him recognition as an original and modern writer. This reputation was further solidified by the immense popularity of his Society Comedies: Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all staged in London’s West End between 1892 and 1895.

Wilde’s success was tragically brief. In 1891, he met and fell passionately in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, at the peak of his dramatic career, Wilde initiated a failed libel suit against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and, following two subsequent trials, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for gross indecency. This experience inspired his work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Upon his release from prison in 1897, Wilde immediately went into self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in 1900, in obscurity.

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