‘Oscar Wilde: A Life’
By Matthew Sturgis
Knopf, 838 pages, $40

Appearances can be deceptive, as Oscar Wilde might have said. 

Even though numerous biographies have been written about him, discoveries of new material — including the full transcript of his libel trial and “detailed witness statements” — plus errors by previous biographers have made welcome another huge work that seeks to supplant Richard Ellmann’s monumental Oscar Wilde (1987).

In his preface, Matthew Sturgis notes that Ellmann was not a historian and did not always read the evidence carefully enough. To figure out what went wrong, you need to turn to the new book’s extensive — though unfortunately unindexed — notes. 

Note 659 takes issue with Ellmann’s portrayal of Wilde’s life as a misfortune marked by suffering from syphilis. Mr. Sturgis, citing Ashley Robins’s “medically informed” “Oscar Wilde: The Great Drama of his Life” (2011), points out that “not a single reference in letters from, to, or about Wilde during his life” even suggested that he had contracted the disease.

Ellmann relied on an early biography of Wilde for the syphilis diagnosis and Mr. Sturgis says he was too taken in by his subject’s posing: “there are moments in the pages of Ellmann when our hero seems almost to be parading through his life as the Oscar Wilde of later legend.”

Mr. Sturgis provides the historical Wilde, correcting Ellmann’s chronology and showing in a painstaking narrative how Wilde gradually became who he said he was all along.  

Who was that? 

The Marquess of Queensberry accused Wilde, in the parlance of the time, of posing as a sodomite. This led to a libel trial that Wilde lost because the opposing side, led by the implacable Edward Carson, went beyond her allegations to prove, with a stunning array of witnesses, that Wilde was a sodomite. 

With Wilde, the man and the artist, the pose was everything. Each play, culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest, was about a society that thrived on posing. Therefore as long as his audiences thought of Wilde himself as a poseur, he was one of them. And they delighted in his witty dialogue that put them in the know — on his level, so to speak.

To find out that Wilde was not simply posing brought down on him the wrath of society and a successful government prosecution. Mr. Sturgis provides fascinating details about the political nature of the trial, with the government seeking to show it was tough on crime after rumors circulated that the prime minister, Lord Rosebery, was also a sodomite.

Why Wilde did not evade the prospect of a harsh prison sentence and alight for the Continent becomes quite clear in Mr. Sturgis’s biography. Wilde hoped he could win his case, which meant winning over society. Without society, in exile, Wilde knew he could not write. He had to bite the hand that fed him, if you will pardon the cliché. 

In Naples, Florence, Paris, post-prison Wilde remained idle. No amount of adulation from friends and visitors overcame the slights of precisely those in high society who had previously relished his wit. Society felt he had shunned it by insisting on “the love that dare not speak its name” — a phrase coined by Wilde’s wayward lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.

Unlike Ellmann and other biographers, Mr. Sturgis does not present Wilde as a tragic figure. Almost to the last, he is seen having a good time. Of course, he became depressed — especially about not writing — but he remained a vital and amusing conversationalist and a very generous patron of his friends.

This biography is especially good at showing that even in his most dire moments, Wilde could not resist a pose. He sought out others who were in the same straits. So he befriended Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, the real traitor in the Dreyfus Affair — not because Wilde believed him innocent but because he enjoyed the company of the guilty.

When Esterhazy declared (as reported in The New York Sun, January 8, 1914), “We are the two greatest martyrs in all humanity. But I have suffered more,” Wilde replied: “No, I have.” It was exactly this kind of posing that Wilde exemplified, suffered for, and, yes, it has to be said: enjoyed.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl,” “A Private Life of Michael Foot,” and 12 other biographies.