The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O'Sullivan

Author:Emer O'Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

26

‘The Crushes’

Though 116 Park Street was by all accounts down at heel, certainly in comparison to the splendour of Merrion Square, it did not stop Jane from entertaining. When exactly Jane started her at-homes is unclear, but definitely by 1882, when Oscar was in America, they were in full swing. Once again she gathered a diverse crowd of artists and literati otherwise unlikely to cross paths. On Saturdays between four o’clock and seven o’clock, many Americans who were stopping in London met with established and aspiring Irish writers. Those who came included the American authors Oliver Wendell Holmes and Francis Bret Harte, the latter best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California, and the clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, an advocate of women’s suffrage, foe of slavery and the subject of one of the most notorious adultery trials in nineteenth-century America. Literature was well represented with the English-born novelist, Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of The Secret Garden, and Marie Corelli, then one of the most widely read novelists. Eleanor Marx came, so did the socialist and struggling Irish writer, George Bernard Shaw. Other Irish writers who turned up included George Moore, Katharine Tynan and W. B. Yeats, who was a great favourite of the Wilde family. The poet, Robert Browning, also came often.

These were not sumptuous gatherings where diamonds dripped from the necks of ladies. On the contrary, the presence of many concerned with the life of the mind was Jane’s measure of success. The at-homes drew the classless world of artists, the world in which she felt at home, giving force to the Irish Times portrait of Lady Wilde as a woman who opened her doors wider for those who respected intellect rather than class. Shaw, for instance, was invited when he was living impecuniously in London. ‘Morbidly self-conscious’, as his biographer, Michael Holroyd, described him, Shaw dreaded making this step into a society where he expected to feel ill at ease among Dublin’s elite; they were, for him, the Wildes of Merrion Square. To equip himself for the ordeal, according to Holroyd, Shaw sought out from the catalogue of the British Museum volumes on polite behaviour, poring over Manners and Tone of Good Society, and learning to avoid sipping the contents of the finger bowl.1 Though Shaw described these gatherings as ‘desperate affairs’, he accredited Jane’s good nature and kindness, especially as he was then an impoverished nonentity. ‘Lady Wilde was nice to me in London during the desperate days between my arrival in 1876 and my first earning of an income by my pen in 1885.’ He also spoke of an occasion when he dined with Jane and a former tragedy queen called Miss Glynn, when the conversation ran from Schopenhauer (Jane’s pet subject) to the oratorical style of Gladstone.2 What may have mattered the most to Jane was the open fellowship she enjoyed among several of the younger generation, with Yeats in particular. From their first meeting in 1888 they developed a deep bond of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.