Mother of Oscar: Life of Jane Francesca Wilde Book

This biography presents Lady Wilde as the linchpin of the Wilde family. Courageous and strongminded, as a young woman she defied her Protestant family's pro-Union politics and, during the terrible days of the Great Famine, writing under the name of Speranza, she electrified Ireland with her passionate tirades in verse and prose against the English. When she married the brilliant eye and ear surgeon Dr William Wilde, later knighted by Queen Victoria, she transferred her loyalty to him and her children. At one point she bravely defended her husband in court in a libel case that was the sensation of Dublin and foreshadowed Oscar's own trial some 30 years later. Lady Wilde adored both her sons and they in turn adored her. Oscar was to compare her intellectually with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and historically with the revolutionary Madame Roland. Like Madame Roland, Lady Wilde, whose "talk was like fireworks - brilliant, whimsical and flashy", held salons to which the literary world came and over which she presided with panache. Although Willie, her elder son, has been eclipsed by Oscar, her hopes for him were as high as for Oscar and indeed in 1879, when she joined her sons in London, Willie was thought to have a brilliant journalistic career ahead of him. In "Mother of Oscar" the complex relationship between Willie, Oscar and their mother is explained. Since her sons revered her as they did, Lady Wilde's influence over them was strong and they inherited both strengths and weaknesses from her. Witty, often outrageous, with strong feminist views, she was a most memorable woman.Read More