Gossip

The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip (American Edition)
by Neil Titley

(Dan Shepelavy, Vanessa Heron, Editors)
Universal Exports of North America. (Philadelphia), 2023.

If you are about to start reading hundreds of biographies, memoirs, and diaries in search of informative or amusing (and preferably salacious) anecdotes about the Victorians in general, and Oscar Wilde in particular, then Stop!—you don’t have to. Neil Titley has done that for you.

The result is The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip which was first self-published in the UK in 2011—and has now been completely updated and retype-set in an American edition, lovingly embraced in a deluxe softcover (hardcover to follow by subscription).

Of all Wilde books, “Gossip” uniquely eludes classification: it lies somewhere amid history, biography, encyclopedia, and treasury, and thus defies traditional critique. Besides, it’s usually unwise to attempt a review, or any literary endeavor, after Stephen Fry‘s succinctness and erudition on the subject has already landed in one’s lap.

So in hearty agreement, let us defer to these immortal words:

How often we read the phrase “Oscar Wilde and his Circle” – but that circle was much more than a close coterie of fellow artists, writers, poets and Bohemians, it was actually a vast network that intersected with every part of the late Victorian age, its nodes and hubs connecting wildly disparate figures in countless astonishing ways.

Neil Titley seems to have invented a new form of biography, one that offers not just the roots, trunks and branches of a life but gives us the foliage, blossoms and fruit too.

Yet more than that, this magnificent gift to the world of Wildean studies allows us the most informative, delicious, hilarious, outrageous, touching and enthralling picture of the entire era.

Just as Wilde taught us to take the serious things in life trivially and the trivial things with a sincere and studied seriousness, so Titley’s masterpiece teaches us the important lesson that true biography is the story of friendships, alliances, rivalries and feuds, that lives are lived in the confusion and colour of personal interactions not in the ordered monochrome of ideas and events.

And it is just so damned readable…’

Stephen Fry

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