The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VIII: The Short Fiction

This edition collects and prints all of Oscar Wilde’s short fiction, principally the three collections of tales published in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The first of these was The Happy Prince (1888), a volume which was aimed at the children’s market, and which capitalized on the growing popularity of fairy stories in nineteenth-century Britain. This edition then prints Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891), Wilde’s volume of short tales satirizing the manners and morals of London’s elite in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and Wilde’s second volume of fairy stories, A House of Pomegranates (1891). Wilde also wrote stories which were not collected, most importantly a jeu d'esprit on the identity of the addressee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets–‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’, a piece which appeared in periodical form in the late 1880s and which he then expanded, turning it into a hybrid of fiction and criticism. This work remained unpublished in Wilde’s lifetime, and represents his most sustained and eloquent exploration of male-male desire; Wilde’s manuscript of that story is printed in full here for the first time.