Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, to surgeon Sir William Wilde and writer Jane Wilde ('Speranza').

Wilde read classics at Trinity College Dublin from 1871 to 1874, winning the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek.

Wilde attended Magdalen College, Oxford, on a scholarship, winning the Newdigate Prize for his poem 'Ravenna' in 1878 and graduating with a double first.

Wilde undertook a year-long North American lecture tour on aestheticism in 1882, delivering well over a hundred lectures.

Wilde married Constance Lloyd in London on 29 May 1884; the couple had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.

Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, first appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 and was published in revised book form in 1891.

Wilde's comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St James's Theatre in London on 14 February 1895 to great acclaim.

After a failed libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency on 25 May 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour, served largely in Reading Gaol.

On release from prison in May 1897 Wilde immediately left for France, never returning to Britain, and published The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898.

Wilde died of meningitis at the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris at age 46 and was later reinterred at Pere Lachaise Cemetery.