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 the extent of estranging himself from his family. By Richard Ellmann's account, he was a precocious seventeen-year-old who "so young and yet so knowing, was determined to seduce Wilde". According to Daniel Mendelsohn, Wilde, who had long alluded to Greek love, was "initiated into homosexual sex" by Ross, while his "marriage had begun to unravel after his wife's second pregnancy, which left him physically repelled". Criticism over artistic matters in "The Pall Mall Gazette" provoked a letter in self-defence, and soon Wilde was a contributor to that and other journals during 1885–87. He enjoyed reviewing and journalism; the form suited