Modern biographers who lack religious faith themselves are likely to misunderstand their subject if he is searching for faith in his own life. This is very apparent in a biography I have just read: The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O’Sullivan.
O’Sullivan has tackled as her theme a family both blessed and cursed; in particular Oscar Wilde, who was more complex and more brilliant than most other men of his time. Inevitably, our own age views him differently from his contemporaries who were charmed, then scandalised, by his personality, his exploits, his notoriety and his downfall. A contemporary celebrity, Stephen Fry, calls this biography “an indispensable contribution to Wildean literature.” I wonder.
