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's tomb wings, giving the feeling of forward flight; the conception was purely symbolical, the conception of a poet as a messenger, but many people tried to read into it a portrait of Oscar Wilde. In the original sketches, the influences have been linked to the winged Assyrian bulls in the British Museum. The small angel figure behind the ear of the Sphinx may have been a deliberate reference by Epstein to the verse in Wilde's poem "The Sphinx": "sing me all your memories". Upon the headress there are five figures, one with a crucifix, perhaps symbolising the martyrdom of Oscar Wilde;