Oscar Wilde hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote "De Profundis" (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46. Oscar Wilde was born at 21
Oscar Wilde "To Constance Mary Wilde". "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.", which Wilde had begun in 1887, was first published in "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine" in July 1889. It is a short story, which reports a conversation, in which the theory that Shakespeare's sonnets were written out of the poet's love of the boy actor "Willie Hughes", is advanced, retracted, and then propounded again. The only evidence for this is two supposed puns within the sonnets themselves. The anonymous narrator is at first sceptical, then believing, finally flirtatious with the reader: he concludes that "there is really a great deal to be