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Oscar Wilde on his Subdividing Himself

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Arthur H. Nethercot*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University

Extract

The following letter by Oscar Wilde, generously sent to me by Professor Waldo H. Dunn of Scripps College, may be of interest to the readers of my article, “Oscar Wilde and the Devil's Advocate,” published in the September 1944 number of PMLA, for it seems to be a pretty direct confirmation by Wilde himself of some of the speculations which I made concerning Wilde's splitting himself into different and often antithetical persons in his published works. So far as Mr. Dunn and I can discover, this letter seems never to have been printed. Mr. Dunn tells me that he found it in the Alexander Turnbull Library (now the National Library) in Wellington, New Zealand, when he was working there in 1932–33; and the holograph is presumably still there. The founder of the library, he says, “was a really great collector, and purchased letters, rare books, and proof sheets with discrimination.”

Type
Comment and Criticism
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945

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