The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde’s Oral Tales

In his 1912 study of Oscar Wilde, the writer and journalist Arthur Ransome wrote that ‘the flowers of his [Wilde’s] talk bloom only in dead men’s memories, and have been buried with their skulls’.¹ This somewhat romantic notion was by no means the case, especially as regards Wilde’s oral stories, a range of which were recorded in memoirs and biographical sketches about him, with some being developed into imaginative fictions of somewhat dubious literary merit. Two of the biblical tales, ‘L’Inutile Résurrection’ and ‘Le Miracle des Stigmates’, considered in some detail in the previous chapter, underwent extensive refashioning in writings