Portrait head of Florence, Mrs Bram Stoker. Pencil on paper. Edward Burne-Jones c. 1888. (credit: Bram Stoker Estate)
Oscar Wilde’s early romance and break-up with Florence Balcombe are well documented; as is her subsequent marriage to Bram Stoker.
Less well known, and under-appreciated for their relevance, are two compositions of regret and resignation found side-by-side in Oscar Wilde’s Poems (1881).
The two poems are titled “Her Voice” and “My Voice” that Wilde casts respectively to show the male and female attitude towards the end of a relationship.
William Cody (Buffalo Bill) and Oscar Wilde [See cartoon at the foot of the page]
The Fiction of the Wilde West
Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cowboys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity!
The American expression “horse feathers” is a quaint riposte of contemptuous disbelief to foolish or untrue claims deemed to be as unlikely as feathers on a horse.
Oscar meant this kindly—he favored the folklore of the American frontier, and as we know, often welcomed the opportunity for the facts and fiction of his life to become conflated. As Jan Wellington observed in the article Oscar Wilde’s West: “Wilde and the West were myths in process.”
In this article we shall see how those old myths were eventually processed into modern fiction.
