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Oscar Wilde's Crucifix

Maarten Asscher
€18.50
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19th century sex and gender studies
A01=Maarten Asscher
Arthur Conan Doyle
Author_Maarten Asscher
Bram Stoker
Category=DNBL
Category=NHD
Dracula
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Florence Balcombe
Oscar Wilde
Sherlock Holmes
Victorian literature
Vincent Price
Walt Whitman

Product details

  • ISBN 9781940423210
  • Dimensions: 139 x 209mm
  • Publication Date: 22 May 2025
  • Publisher: Four Winds Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

While a student at Oxford, Oscar Wilde was courting a beautiful Dublin girl, Florence Balcombe, and on Christmas Day 1876 he presented her with a love gift of a golden crucifix. Two years later, Florence surprised Oscar by suddenly marrying another young writer from Dublin, Bram Stoker, the future author of Dracula.

Dutch writer Maarten Asscher uses that crucifix as a fulcrum to examine Wilde’s early development as an artist, from a seminal trip to Greece to his whirlwind tour of America and beyond, including real-life encounters with Walt Whitman and Arthur Conan Doyle. Asscher draws on the complete panoply of Wilde scholarship to supplement historical fact with imaginative reconstruction, including a myth-busting account of Wilde’s deathbed in Paris, and a fictional solution to the mystery of the crucifix delivered by none other than Sherlock Holmes.  The result is a convincing and original interpretation of Victorian history, and a literary tour de force.
About Maarten Asscher
Maarten Asscher was publisher of the leading Dutch publisher J M Meulenhoff for eight years, and managing director of Athenaeum Bookshop in Amsterdam for fifteen years. He has published more than twenty books including novels, poems, and essays, to critical acclaim. A selection of his essays was translated in the US as Apples & Oranges: In Praise of Comparisons (Four Winds Press, 2015). Oscar Wilde’s Crucifix is his first book written in English. He lives in Amsterdam.

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