Truly Wilde: Dolly Wilde and the Subversive Salon Book

For sixty years she was a delicious rumor: Oscar Wilde's enchanting niece Dorothy. Born a scant three months after her uncle's notorious arrest and raised in the shadow of the greatest scandal of the turn of the 20th Century, Dorothy Ierne Wilde died exactly as she lived: vividly, rather violently, and at a very good address.

A "born writer" who never completed the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination, Dolly Wilde was charged with charm, brilliantly witty, changeable as refracting light, and loaded with sexual allure. She made her career in the salonsand in the bedroomsof some of London's and Paris' most interesting women and men. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, she drenched her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs, and created continuous sensations by the ways in which she seemed to be re-living the life of her infamous uncle.

In this revolutionary and very modern biography, Joan Schenkar provides a fascinating look at what it means to live with the talents but not the achievements of biography's usual subjects: those obliterating "winners"like Dolly's uncle Oscarwhose stories have almost erased riveting histories like Dolly's own. And she uncovers never-before-published evidence of the hidden life of the Wilde family and of the extraordinary salon society of Natalie Clifford Barney, Dolly Wilde's longest and most fatal attachment.

"At last, an in-depth portrait of the 'Beautiful Loser of the Wilde family,' a brilliant eccentric whom Janet Flanner rightly described as 'like a character out of a book.' Anyone interested in modernism, gender-bending and/or expatriate Paris will be enthralled by Joan Schenkar's penetrating and often poignant biography of a woman strangely charismatic and witty enough to be 'truly Wilde.'" Sandra M. Gilbert, co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic and No Man's Land

"Truly Wilde is a revelation, the great story of a life and of the creation of modern culture. Read this biography for its high drama, its hijinks, and, at the end, for its poignancy and horror." Catharine R. Stimpson, author and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University

"Joan Schenkar has lifted a veil to reveal a sophisticated, overheated lesbian world in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the center is Oscar Wilde's niece Dollyself-destructive, self-dramatizing, magnetic. This is a great story, beautifully told." Edmund White

"A touching portrait of a louche, lush and lascivious lady who makes today's alleged It Girls look like the vapid paper-dolls they areand a vivid picture of a time when, incredibly, the wealthy and titled were also witty and talented." Julie Burchill, columnist for The Guardian