If you read Oscar’s Ghost (or even if you didn’t) and you wanted to know more about the prison manuscript that was at the heart of it all, I highly recommend this book.Īn idea came to me while I was reading one of the De Profundis annotations. This is a wonderful edition, well laid out, easy to follow, full of interesting insights and to top it all off, unlike a number of the scholarly editions out there, it is affordable. Every time a new version with notes and annotations comes out, I am gripped again. There is the mystery of what Wilde wanted to do with the work, and the impact it had on two of his friends, the battle over its ownership and how it would frame the biography of Oscar Wilde for future generations. Then there is the question of the conditions under which he wrote it. There are the soaring passages about Wilde’s philosophical journey in prison that first drew me in. I can’t tell you why, but my fascination with that document never seems to wane. I wanted more, and turned to the version published in the Complete Letters, and that left me with more questions, which led me to biographies of Wilde, Ross and Douglas. It began when I read Robert Ross’s edited 1905 version. It reminded me of what led me on my Oscar’s Ghost journey to begin with: my fascination with Wilde’s prison opus De Profundis. Recently I started reading The Annotated Prison Writing of Oscar Wilde edited by Nicholas Frankel.
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