The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde is a 1983 novel by Peter Ackroyd. It won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1984. The novel is written in the form of a diary which Oscar Wilde was writing in Paris in 1900, up to his death. The diary itself is completely fictional, as is the detail contained, although the events and most of the characters (such as the characters of Lord Alfred Douglas, Robert Ross and the Earl of Rosebery and his incarceration, at Pentonville, later Reading) are real. In this diary he looks back at
Oscar Wilde words – the Bad Boy doing so well in the end!" After graduation from Oxford, Wilde returned to Dublin, where he met again Florence Balcombe, a childhood sweetheart. She became engaged to Bram Stoker and they married in 1878. Wilde was disappointed but stoic: he wrote to her, remembering "the two sweet years – the sweetest years of all my youth" they had spent together. He also stated his intention to "return to England, probably for good." This he did in 1878, only briefly visiting Ireland twice. Unsure of his next step, he wrote to various acquaintances enquiring about Classics