Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, credited to Frank Harris, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, by Frank Harris. Read by Martin Geeson. Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who "knew" the subject more or less intimately, and the more objective or scholarly accounts produced by later generations. In the case of Wilde, as presented to us by Frank Harris, we are in a way doubly estranged from the subject. We meet with Oscar the charismatic talker, whose tone of voice can never be reproduced – even if a more scrupulous biographer had set down his words accurately – and we are perhaps already aware of him as Wilde the self-destructive celebrity who uneasily fills the place of the premier gay icon and martyr in our contemporary view. Neither of these images will do. We need to read as many accounts as possible. Harris, though himself a self-advertising literary and sexual buccaneer, takes a wincingly representative view of Wilde’s homophile activity: for him it is a patrician excrescence, the abominable vice of the few, contracted at English boarding schools – though thankfully “not infectious” as far as he himself is concerned. What a long road we have to travel to arrive at the essentially gay man of today! But there are many shortcuts to take us back to where we came from… (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions
• Author credits: Frank Harris
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 29
• Listed recording duration: 16:11:43

Catalogue topics

• biography
• oscar wilde
• wilde
• homosexuality
• bosie
• queensberry
• gaol
• jail

Opening tracks: first 24 of 29

1. 00 - Author's Introduction — 9:27
2. 01 - I. Oscar's Father and Mother on Trial — 36:50
3. 02 - II. Oscar Wilde as a Schoolboy — 22:58
4. 03 - III. Trinity, Dublin: Magdalen, Oxford — 23:30
5. 04 - IV. Formative Influences: Oscar's Poems — 41:05
6. 05 - V. Oscar's Quarrel with Whistler and Marriage — 30:38
7. 06 - VI. Oscar Wilde's Faith and Practice — 19:21
8. 07 - VII. Oscar's Reputation and Supporters — 17:28
9. 08 - VIII. Oscar's Growth to Originality About 1890 — 36:44
10. 09 - IX. The Summer of Success: Oscar's First Play — 19:29
11. 10 - X. The First Meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas — 21:50
12. 11 - XI. The Threatening Cloud Draws Nearer — 33:34
13. 12 - XII. Danger Signals: the Challenge — 47:05
14. 13 - XIII. Oscar Attacks Queensberry and is Worsted — 42:56
15. 14 - XIV. How Genius is Persecuted in England — 57:26
16. 15 - XV. The Queen vs. Wilde: The First Trial — 51:53
17. 16 - XVI. Escape Rejected: The Second Trial and Sentence — 52:19
18. 17 - XVII. Prison and the Effects of Punishment — 42:23
19. 18 - XVIII. Mitigation of Punishment; but not Release — 31:38
20. 19 - XIXa. His St. Martin's Summer: His Best Work - Part One — 43:28
21. 20 - XIXb. His St. Martin's Summer: His Best Work - Part Two — 33:35
22. 21 - XX. The Results of His Second Fall: His Genius — 48:32
23. 22 - XXI. His Sense of Rivalry; His Love of Life and Laziness — 30:54
24. 23 - XXII. 'A Great Romantic Passion!' — 33:44

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This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.