In his early thirties, Merlin Holland went to the launch of an anthology of work by Rebecca West at Searcys restaurant in London. There, a certain actress took it upon herself to introduce him to the famously irascible playwright Harold Pinter. ‘Harold,’ she said, ‘this is Merlin Holland. He is Oscar Wilde’s grandson.’ Pinter didn’t pause. ‘So what?’ he replied, before turning back to the person to whom he had been talking before. This was in 1977. Now, after a Pinteresque pause of almost half a century, Holland has finally got around to answering that question.  

After Oscar is a 600-plus-page labour of love recounting the ways in which Oscar Wilde’s unique legacy has affected the lives of his family members, including his grandson Merlin. In Wilde’s day, his witty, brittle plays made him the toast of the town. Yet his fall from grace in 1895, after he was convicted of consorting with rent boys and sentenced to two years of hard labour, was so spectacular that he became a myth: the social and literary butterfly broken on the wheel of 19th-century law. 

Wilde’s works – particularly the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the play The Importance of Being Earnest – are constantly revived, along with the conversation that accompanies them. In an effort to escape Wilde’s shadow, his wife, Constance, vainly changed her and her children’s surname to Holland, and