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
Willie Wilde it was "an undeniably clever piece of work; and even though it has its weaknesses, it reflects credit on its author. ... It is emphatically a play to see." Oscar, believing that he recognised his brother's hand behind the anonymous review, was by then writing "A Woman of No Importance", in which one character says: "After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations." By now Willie Wilde was in serious financial difficulties and Oscar began giving him money, but bad feeling between the brothers heightened when Oscar discovered that Willie was pestering their mother for money