The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde his life, writing, and ruin through trial and gaol. Included are fairy tales much like those Wilde wrote, although again these are wholly Ackroyd's invention. The last pages are written in the character of Maurice, Wilde's valet. 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
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