Oscariana - New Information

Oscariana was the title of a collection of epigrams from Wilde’s works that Constance Wilde was assembling during the Worthing holiday of 1894. The intention was that it be published by Arthur Humphreys, with whom she briefly fell in love that summer. In the event the book was published privately the following year.

The Oscariana section of this website is for new information of interest that has come to light since Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer was published in 2014.

The first link offers further information about Alphonse Conway’s past.

The second link examines Alphonse Conway’s life after the Wilde scandal. The author is Richard Wood, a retired administrator from London with a long-standing interest in fin de siècle history. Wood wrote to Antony Edmonds in the spring of 2019 to inform him of his research about Conway – research so compelling that Edmonds suggested it be turned into an article for this website. Wood can be contacted at .

The third link considers Oscar Wilde’s use of the term “Hellenic” to describe Percy, the teenage boy on whom Bosie developed a crush in Worthing in the summer of 1894.

The fourth link examines closely the way Matthew Sturgis used the narrative and the research from Oscar Wilde’s Scandalous Summer in his 2018 book Oscar: A Life. These borrowings – some credited, some not - relate to material about Constance Wilde, to Wilde’s sons Cyril and Vyvyan and, most notably, about Arthur Humphreys, where Sturgis follows Edmonds rather than Franny Moyle, Constance Wilde’s most recent biographer, in two important respects.