Oscar wilde and feminist criticism

Abstract

If feminist criticism only came around to embracing Oscar Wilde late, very late in the twentieth century, we can lay at least some of the blame for that at the feet of Virginia Woolf. From the turn-of-the-century through the late-1930s, she spoke both to and from the heart of modernist circles. Her opinions of books and authors were delivered authoritatively and took on the weight of authority, whether issued anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement or through her two series of the Common Reader in 1925 and 1932. And of Wilde she consistently said little, neither engaging with his work nor addressing the significance of his life. It was clear from such silence that she did not consider him a subject of importance — just the opposite of the view that might have been expected. After all, she herself was a sexual dissident, her dearest Bloomsbury friends were gay men, and she was opposed both politically and morally to repressive institutional forces of the kind that had contrived to prosecute Wilde, as she demonstrated through her sympathetic portrait of the persecuted Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway (1925).