What Kind of Love Came to Professor Guildea? Robert Hichens, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Ghosts of Hyde Park

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which ghost stories by Robert Hichens (1864-1950) inhabit the repressive sexual climate that followed the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Through a close reading of Tongues of Conscience (1900) and particularly 'How Love Came to Professor Guildea', it argues that Hichens used the ghost story as a mask for more complex investigations of homoeroticism, desire, and denial, and that the 'morbidity' contemporary critics recognized but could not pin down is closely linked to the story’s sexual ambivalence.