What happened to oscar wilde's children
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The mysterious death of Oscar Wilde's wife Constance Lloyd
The mystery surrounding the death of Oscar Wilde’s wife may have been solved by none other than the grandson of the famous wit and writer. He believes he found the reason his grandmother died tragically at the age of 40 just over a century ago.
According to the Daily Mail, speculation over Constance Wilde’s sudden death has ranged from spinal damage after falling downstairs to syphilis contracted from her husband. But medical evidence discovered in family letters by Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, indicates that Constance probably had multiple sclerosis.
The letters contain passages describing symptoms, such as debilitating pain, extreme headaches and fatigue, and the inability to walk, which Dr. Ashley H. Robins says are associated with the autoimmune disease.
The condition was known at the time, but evidence suggests that the author’s wife fell victim to eccentric medical practices. Constance sought help from an unnamed German ‘nerve doctor,’ who treated patients with baths and electricity, and an Italian, L
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Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde by Franny Moyle – review
The jacket of this entrancing biography conflates two photographs to present one perfect whole: the ideal husband and his perfect family. Pretty, large-eyed Constance, dressed in the soft aesthetic style she helped to make fashionable, is embraced by the older of the couple's two small sons. Oscar, sporting a new short haircut and sober buttoned-up jacket, looks gravely at the camera. He holds aloft an unlit cigarette. Visiting the Wildes' smart Chelsea home on Christmas day, 1888 (the year before these photographs were taken), WB Yeats noted a life of perfect harmony that suggested, nevertheless, "some deliberate artistic composition". Yeats's observation was both shrewd and misleading.
In 1888, Constance Lloyd had known Oscar Wilde for nine years; she had been married to him for four. Her love for her brilliant husband ("As long as I live you shall be my lover," she wrote in answer to his proposal in 1883) was fully returned. "I feel incomplete without you," Osca
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Catherine Peters
Constance Lloyd will for ever be remembered chiefly as Mrs Oscar Wilde, though she was an original and unusual person in her own right. As the subtitle of this new biography makes plain, Franny Moyle’s emphasis inevitably falls on the marriage and its aftermath, particularly the scandal and disaster that overtook Constance and her children following Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment. When Constance died prematurely at the age of thirty-nine, her sons effectively lost both parents. They were never to see their father again and were kept away from Oscar’s friends, who might have helped them to come to terms with what had happened. The concealment, deception and prejudice that surrounded the two boys affected them deeply, as Vyvyan Holland’s heartbreakingly sad and angry book Son of Oscar Wilde (1954) revealed.
Constance’s life began almost as badly as it ended. Her father died when she was sixteen and her mother abused her, physically and emotionally. Though she was close to her brother Otho, Constance was desperate to escape from home. Moving to her grandfather
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