Jonathan Keates
Suburban Decadence
More Letters of Oscar Wilde
By Rupert Hart-Davis (ed)
John Murray 215pp £12.50 order from our bookshop
Apart from the inevitable Shakespeare, Byron and Walter Scott, only one other British writer has really made it in Europe, and that of course is Oscar Wilde. His name has acquired a totemic importance among those whose knowledge of English literature is otherwise inconsiderable. He is represented not simply as the homosexual protomartyr but as a figure whose very existence was essential to the establishment of a modern movement in art.
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