Stories and Essays, including advertisement flyer
Sight and Song
John Bull. Vol. XXIII, no. 627
John Bull. Vol. XXIII, no. 628
My Life and Dancing
Salomé: Drame en une Acte
Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde
The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser
Acting Scripts for a Private Performance of Salomé
The Trials of Oscar Wilde newspaper serialisation
A Minor Poet and Other Verse
The trial of Oscar Wilde was a seminal moment in the discussion of homosexuality, and it has been argued that ‘our stereotypical notion of male homosexuality derives from Wilde’ (Sinfield, 1994). The Library has numerous items showing Wilde’s extraordinary cultural presence before the trial, and his marginal readership afterwards. The banned Salome is iconic in this respect, and we hold a copy shakily autographed by Wilde to Aubrey Beardsley, and the worn acting scripts used by the performers in a very rare private, thus legal, production. In séance transcripts we even have Wilde repudiating his homosexuality from beyond the grave. In contrast to this recrimination and repudiation, we hold richly decorated works by Michael Field, actually Katharine Harris Bradley and her niece and ward Edith Emma Cooper, a gay couple. This section also notes the symbolic power of Salome to disrupt in the figure of dancer Maud Allan, who sued for libel in 1918 after being accused of representing a German plot, known to the press as the Cult of the Clitoris, to send 47,000 gay men and women to Britain to seduce the population and sap moral fibre.