General
Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions
Free options are listed first. Book Search Party does not host audio.
Free sources are not affiliate links.
Listen for free
- LibriVoxListen at LibriVox (opens in a new tab)
Free public-domain recording.
Download MP3 ZIP (opens in a new tab)Read the text (opens in a new tab) - Internet ArchiveListen at Internet Archive (opens in a new tab)
Free public-domain recording.
About this audiobook
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)
Summary source: LibriVox / Wikipedia.
Public-domain status depends on your jurisdiction. Check the source page before downloading or redistributing.