Had she married a man of inferior mind he would have dwindled down into insignificance or their struggle for superiority would have been terrific.
JOHN ELGEE, writing about his niece Jane1
Shortly after eight o’clock on the morning of Wednesday, 12 November 1851, a carriage brought Dr William Wilde and Jane’s uncle John Elgee to the door of 34 Leeson Street, the home she had shared with her mother, recently deceased, for the past eight years. To the men’s surprise, Jane was ready to leave, allowing them to reach St Peter’s on Aungier Street,* her parish church, in time for a nine o’clock wedding. The modest ceremony that joined ‘William R. Wilde Esq., F.R.C.S.’ and ‘Jane Francesca’ was conducted by the groom’s older brother, Reverend John M. Wilde. For the occasion, Jane had exchanged her mourning clothes for a ‘very rich dress of Limerick lace’ with matching veil worn under a head wreath of white flowers, but she was back in black by eleven o’clock that same morning.
Both bride and groom were well known in the capital, and their dozens of acquaintances would surely have delighted in witnessing the sealing of such a dynamic alliance, but a lavish wedding would have been inappropriate on account of Sarah’s death. Describing the day to the bride’s estranged sister, Emily, Elgee hinted that the couple had married a day earlier than expected and confirmed: ‘nobody were present save our own party and the old hangers on of the church’. Perhaps they desired an auspicious start to their married life. An old folk rhyme beloved of Victorian brides advised: ‘Wed on Wednesday, happy match’. Theirs was certainly happy, but it did not lack turbulence.
After a celebratory breakfast at the Glebe house, Elgee waved the newlyweds off on their short journey to the coastal village of Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire, where they caught the steamer to Holyhead. Judging by his letter to Emily, he was determined to improve relations between the sisters: ‘I don’t want to see open war between you and them’, he cautioned. Acknowledging that ‘love of self’ was a prominent feature of Jane’s flamboyant character, he countered by insisting that she possessed, ‘some heart’ and, ‘good impulses’. It reassured him that she chose for her husband a man she clearly liked and respected. ‘Had she married a man of inferior mind he would have dwindled down into insignificance or their struggle for superiority would have been terrific’, he warned.
William Wilde was an exceptional man and Jane would not have been content with anyone lesser. Three years earlier, she had told her friend John Hilson, ‘My soul needs to worship; it seems the fulfilment of my being’.2 Now, she described her impressive new husband to him:
… he is a celebrity – a man eminent in his profession, of acute intellect and much learning, the best conversationalist in our metropolis, and author of many books, literary and scientific.3
The third son of a country doctor, William had followed his father into the medical profession rather than join his two older brothers in the church. He excelled at his training, rounding off his apprenticeship with a year of midwifery at the Rotunda Hospital, where he achieved the highest pass in the final examination. William’s mentor, the eminent surgeon Dr Robert Graves, suggested that he fund further study overseas by accepting the post of personal physician to a tubercular Scottish merchant who planned to embark on a nine-month-long voyage around the Mediterranean. Afterwards, William published The Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Tenerife, and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean, a colourful and commercially successful account of his experiences.4
Letters of introduction supplied by his friend Maria Edgeworth, a prolific and respected writer, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, gave William access to the highest intellectual circles in Europe.* Having completed his medical training in London, Vienna, Munich, Prague, Dresden and Heidelberg, he returned to Dublin and operated a clinic from his home at 15 Westland Row; he also converted a disused stable into a dispensary for the treatment of eye and ear complaints afflicting the grateful poor of the city. In 1841, William was appointed Medical Commissioner for the Irish census, an onerous role that required a comprehensive audit of the incidence of sickness and disease across the island. Three years later, he established St Mark’s Hospital and Dispensary for Diseases of the Eye and Ear, the first hospital in Ireland to combine treatment of the eye and ear, and the first in the British Isles to teach aural surgery. He also co-founded and edited the highly respected Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science. William Wilde combined medical eminence with a scholarly interest in the folk traditions of Ireland. He wrote books and papers on a wide variety of subjects: medical, ethnological, archaeological and historical.
At thirty-six, William was a worldly man who had fathered three children, each one acknowledged and supported by him. His son, Henry Wilson was thirteen at the time of his father’s wedding and was commonly passed off as his nephew. His daughters, Emily, aged four, and her infant sister Mary lived under the care of his brother Ralph, Church of Ireland Rector at Drumsnat in County Monaghan. Although the identity of the mother, or mothers, of these children was never disclosed, a mysterious black-veiled woman was wont to appear at times of crisis and John Butler Yeats, who knew the Wilde family well, told his son William that the girls’ mother kept a ‘small black oak shop’ in Dublin.5 As public attitudes towards unmarried mothers were censorious, women often concealed their illegitimate children.
In Jane Elgee, William had found a worthy partner who was described by those who knew her as ‘extremely attractive in appearance and brilliant in conversation’.6 Poet Denis Florence McCarthy considered her ‘gifted’, but, ‘terrible and beautiful as an Amazon’.7 Statuesque at almost six feet tall, she towered over her slightly built husband, but their intellects were well matched if their appearances were not. Both were gifted linguists: while Jane spoke several European languages and was well respected as a translator of literary works, William acted as Secretary of Foreign Correspondence for the Royal Irish Academy. They shared a keen interest in ethnology and a love for their country, recording together and separately the folklore, customs and traditions of Ireland. William used the opportunity of the census to collect firsthand accounts from peasant families. In her introduction to his Memoir of Gabriel Béranger, which she completed after his death, Jane admired the way her husband, ‘the Docteur Mor (the great Doctor as they called him)’, had ‘brought back joy and hope to many households’ by treating the ailments of the poor in exchange for a story or an artefact.8
Although less overtly political than his wife, William abhorred the inequalities that persisted in Irish society and railed against the: ‘unjust economy which the English Exchequer has ever pursued towards Ireland’.9 In his role as Medical Commissioner for the Irish census of 1841, and, later, as Assistant Commissioner for the census of 1851, he witnessed first-hand the devastation that had been wrought by the famine. Like Jane, he berated the landlords and governors of Ireland for failing to improve the lot of her citizens and despaired at the tide of emigration that had taken the most able-bodied overseas. As a medical practitioner, he felt personally affronted by the scourge of unchecked disease, which filled hospitals beyond their capacity. It was his contention that the root of this hardship lay in the plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when ‘The “mere Irish” were driven like wolves into the wilds and fastnesses of Donegal and Connaught, without their condition being one iota improved in two centuries’.10
Jane, raised by her mother alone, had oddly subjugated notions of marriage, even for an era when married women were categorised in common law as ‘feme covert’ to emphasise their subordination: ‘… my great soul is prisoned within a woman’s destiny’ she cried: ‘Nothing interests me beyond the desire to make him [William] happy — for this I could kill myself’.11 In this, she was strangely dichotomous and it is noteworthy that, while Oscar enjoyed the company of women who were strong, intelligent, forthright and arresting in appearance, he chose as his wife a woman with all of those characteristics who also pledged her life to him: ‘I worship you my hero and my god!’, she wrote, choosing language that is strikingly similar to that used by her mother-in-law.12
After they were married, William and Jane moved into his old bachelor home at 21 Westland Row in the heart of Dublin. A popular duo, they were welcomed into society and Jane was not in the least bit intimidated in any company. In Reminiscences, Dublin-born novelist and poet Katharine Tynan, who would later befriend Oscar and his wife, Constance, described an occasion when her father, Andrew Cullen Tynan, a livestock farmer and enthusiastic nationalist who admired Jane greatly, spotted her, ‘fighting her way, like any man … into some banquet or other’. He admitted ruefully that he ‘still loved her verse though she had disappointed him’.13
The most glittering events were held in Dublin Castle, an imposing seat of power that Jane had advocated be surrounded by barricades and burned to the ground. She found this highly amusing: ‘I went to the last Drawing Room at the castle and Lord Aberdeen smiled very archly as he bent to kiss my cheek,’ she told John Hilson. ‘I smiled too and thought of Jacta Alea Est’.14 Although he too could be tremendously sociable, William was consumed by his medical practice and the mammoth task of completing his census report. During what little spare time remained, he compiled Irish Popular Superstitions, which he dedicated ‘to Speranza’. Jane was occupied too. Her translation of Alexandre Dumas Père’s The Glacier Land appeared in 1852, and she began work on a revised translation from the original Latin of Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg’s intricate imagining of the afterlife. Her critical review of the ‘personal narrative’ of the ship’s surgeon who accompanied her intrepid cousin Robert John le Mesurier McClure appeared in the Dublin University Magazine and she reviewed ‘The Dramas of Calderón’ for the same publication.
William and Jane’s first child, William Charles Kingsbury Wills Wilde arrived on 26 September 1852, six weeks short of his parent’s first wedding anniversary. Jane was caught completely unawares by the intensity of her emotions: ‘What an enchanting richness and fullness these young give to one’s life’, she exclaimed. ‘It is like the return of a second youth. Hope, Energy, Purpose, all awake again with a nobler object than ever’. Gazing down at her infant son, she wondered, ‘How is it I am enthralled by these tiny hands? Was there a woman’s nature in me after all?’15
She had great ambitions for Willie, who was ‘twined round all the fibres’ of her heart, and she decided to ‘rear him a Hero perhaps and President of the future Irish Republic’.16 Motherhood forced Jane to re-evaluate all that had once interested her: ‘Well, well’, she mused, ‘after all talk of Politics, Patriots, poetry, love, literature, intellect, nothing fills the heart like a wee, wee child’.17 But domesticity alone could never fulfill her and her great spirit remained unbowed: ‘I have not fulfilled my destiny yet’, she declared: ‘Gruel and the nursery cannot end me’.18
The death of William’s mentor and friend, Robert Graves, in March 1853, threw him into crisis. Not only had this brilliant man overseen his young student’s medical training, he had also treated him successfully for severe asthma and debilitating bouts of typhoid fever. Overworked, exhausted and beset by grief, William grew increasingly morose, prompting Jane to lament that, although he was so brilliant in society, he had:
… a strange, nervous, hypochondriacal home nature which the world never sees – only I and often it makes me miserable, for I do not know how to deal with fantastic evils, though I could bear up grandly against a real calamity.19
When she asked what might make him happy, ‘he answers death’. Although deeply concerned, Jane was willing to accommodate William’s ‘wayward, turbulent and terrible temperament of genius’.20 She believed that men as brilliant as her husband, and, in time, her son, were ‘masses of emotional force, alternations of violent impulses and silent despair’.21 Her calling, she believed, was to calm his soul:
For the woman that stands beside the man of genius in life much is demanded. She is the angel of his destiny, and accountable to the world for the treasure committed to her care – the peace and serenity of his soul.22
Diversion arrived in the shape of baby Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, born on 16 October 1854. Now, Jane was:
… bound heart and soul to the home hearth by the tiny hands of little Willie and as if these sweet hands were not enough, behold me – me, Speranza – also rocking a cradle … in which lies my second son.23
Although Oscar was ‘large and fine and handsome and healthy’, his brilliant mother grew increasingly morose. She became preoccupied with the worrisome news reaching Dublin from Crimea, where bloody warfare and rampant disease were taking the lives of thousands of young men. She said of her boys: ‘If I can but make them wise and good it seems to me that is all can be done in this brief moment-life of ours’.24 Writing had lost its joy, merely serving to remind her of her lost intellect: ‘I look back on the past as into a former existence’, she told John Hilson, ‘and wonder at my own self that then was’.25 Barely a month after Oscar’s arrival, she wrote: ‘Life has such infinite capacities of woe’.26 It is entirely possible that she was suffering from mild post-partum depression; she exhibited many of the symptoms.
Soon afterwards, Jane found consolation in the deep, rewarding friendship she forged with physicist, astronomer and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton. By coincidence, her husband formed a new friendship too, one that ended in disaster and disgrace ten years later. Hamilton, an extraordinarily brilliant man whose reputation for genius spanned the globe, was appointed Professor of Astronomy and Royal Astronomer of Ireland as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. He developed his groundbreaking theory of quaternions more than a decade before he met Jane. A true polymath and an accomplished poet, he had twice been awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for English verse and enjoyed the friendship of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Although Wordsworth admired Hamilton’s poetry, he counseled:
You send me showers of verses, which I receive with much pleasure, as do we all; yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of Science, which you seem destined to tread with so much honour to yourself and profit to others.27
Hamilton met Jane at a dinner party hosted by Colonel Thomas Larcom, Under-Secretary for Ireland, and his wife Georgina on 13 April 1855. As William and he were members of the Royal Irish Academy, he was asked to hand Jane in to dinner. To his astonishment, after practically no introduction, this ‘very odd and original lady’ asked if he would be godfather to her ‘young pagan’. He was further taken aback to learn that this child was to be given a ‘long baptismal name, or string of names, the two first of which are Oscar and Fingal!’28 Although he declined, Jane bore no grudge, and endeared herself by expressing admiration for poetry composed by his late sister. The next time they met, he presented her with an inscribed copy of Eliza Hamilton’s Poems.29
Over lunch at Dunsink Observatory, Hamilton’s home, Jane informed him that Oscar had been baptised the previous day and they drank a toast to his health. Afterwards, he gave her a tour of his atmospheric house, which Eliza had believed was haunted; Jane expressed a hope that this was true. Yet, although she liked and admired her host, she could not hide her resentment at the wealth his eminence had secured: ‘Let a woman be as clever as she may, there is no prize like this for her!’ she declared.30 Hamilton’s letters to Jane demonstrate a great regard for her intellect. He felt free to discuss any topic with her and included quotations in Latin and Greek, which he acknowledged need not be translated. He admired her noble nature and regarded her as an ‘entirely truthful person’.31 His long, rambling letters could be quite flirtatious: in one, he called her, ‘a very remarkable, a very interesting, and (if I could be forgiven for adding it) a very lovable person’. Yet, he kept his distance and congratulated her on ‘being so happily married’.32
The characteristics Hamilton admired in Jane were not generally prized in Victorian women. He described her as ‘almost amusingly fearless and original and averse’, and he admired her declaration that she liked to ‘make a sensation’.33 Although their politics were at variance, this formed no barrier to their friendship. His heart still ‘throbbed with sympathy, for the great British Empire’, but he argued that this had the advantage of allowing him to understand Jane better, since they shared the experience of sympathising with a whole nation.34
Jane introduced Hamilton to fresh experiences and recommended that he read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter five years before it was published in London on the basis that it had cost her three nights sleep. Oscar invoked this same novel when writing A Woman of No Importance. When Jane sent Hamilton her sixteen-stanza poem Shadows from Life he praised it as ‘wonderfully beautiful’, but suggested several changes, which she made. He shared it with poet Aubrey de Vere, who declared:
She certainly must be a woman of real poetic genius to have written anything so beautiful and also so full of power and grace as the poem you showed me.
De Vere urged: ‘for the sake both of poetry and Old Ireland you must do all you can to make her go on writing, and publish a volume soon’.35 Hamilton invited both friends to a ‘Feast of Poets’, but warned Jane not to allow de Vere to convert her to Catholicism, which she found fascinating.36 Jane admired the Roman Catholic Church, which ‘so well understands the working of the innermost wheels of our complex human nature’. In contrast, she thought of Protestantism as ‘stern, cold and logical’, traits she cared little for.37
Such delights distracted Jane from her troubles at home, where William’s condition was not improving. During the summer of 1855, he fell desperately ill and seemed unable to rest: ‘I look with terror on all that can ruffle the calm happiness of the home life’, Jane wrote.38 The only thing that comforted him was his deep affinity for the West of Ireland. In 1853, William had leased nine acres of remote land in Illaunroe on the shores of Lough Fee, where he built a modest hunting lodge that allowed him to retreat from the world. As his health deteriorated, the whole family decamped there for a fortnight, but Jane struggled in that ‘grand, desolate and bleak’ place, and the sight of roofless cabins whose former occupants had died, or fled as a consequence of famine, left her feeling ‘sick with helpless despair and rage’.39
One consolation of William’s brilliance was the financial security it brought. Returning from Connemara, they swapped the modesty of 21 Westland Row for the opulence of 1 Merrion Square North, a sizable corner house in one of the city’s most fashionable districts. Jane described her new home as having ‘fine rooms and the best situation in Dublin’.40 Alongside the expanding Wilde family, the house could accommodate six domestic servants, a German governess and a French bonne:* both William and Jane were keen to foster proficiency for languages in their children. Their home was also a place of business for William: the third floor contained a set of consulting rooms, connected by a back staircase to his study, a sanctuary where he retired to write in peace.
The rest of the house was Jane’s domain. Flower-decked balconies overlooked the great expanse of Merrion Square and she filled her rooms with imposing walnut and mahogany furniture, laid colourful Turkish carpets underfoot and covered the walls with rich oil paintings, many of them portraits of their more illustrious acquaintances. The first floor dining room was used for Saturday supper parties that lasted from 6.30 p.m. till 11 p.m. and were attended by a dozen ‘clever and learned men’, who discussed ‘all the current topics & literature & science of the day’.41 One guest, William Smith O’Brien, leader of the failed revolution of 1848, insisted on referring to himself as ‘the convict’. Jane always preferred the company of men: ‘As a rule I cannot stand girls or women,’ she told Henriette Corkran, a rare female friend, ‘they are so flimsy, frivolous, feeble in purpose — they so seldom achieve anything’.42
Corkran provides one of the best descriptions of Jane:
A very tall woman – she looked over six feet high – she wore that day a long crimson silk gown which swept the floor. Her skirt was voluminous; underneath there must have been two crinolines, for when she walked there was a peculiar swelling movement like that of a vessel at sea, the sails filled with wind. Over the crimson were flounces of Limerick lace, and round what had once been a waist, an Oriental scarf, embroidered with gold, was twisted. Her long, massive, handsome face was plastered with white powder; over the blue-black glossy hair was a gilt crown of laurels. Her throat was bare, so were her arms, but they were covered with quaint jewellery.43
When the daughter Jane had apparently longed for arrived on 2 April 1857, her family was complete. Some nonsense is talked, even now, about how Jane put Oscar in dresses because she would have preferred him to be a girl. Inevitably, this leads to further nonsense about the effect this had on his sexuality. In fact, Isola was just two-and-a-half years younger than Oscar and the smocks he wore as an infant were commonplace, particularly in Ireland, where a belief persisted that, while the fairies might steal a boy child, these mythical and malevolent creatures would have no interest in a girl. Everyone doted on Isola Francesca Emily Wilde. Jane called her ‘the pet of the house’, adding: ‘She has fine eyes & promises to have a most acute intellect – these two gifts are enough for any woman’.44 At last, Jane seemed content. Her recipe for family harmony, which Oscar embraced with gusto, is very revealing and highly unorthodox:
The best chance, perhaps, of domestic felicity is when all the family are bohemians, and all clever, and all enjoy thoroughly the erratic, impulsive, reckless life of work and glory, indifferent to everything save the intense moments of popular applause.45
Shortly after Isola arrived, Jane formed an extremely significant friendship with a progressive young Swedish woman named Charlotte ‘Lotten’ von Kraemer. Then, as now, Scandinavians took a more enlightened approach to gender equality and Jane’s admiration demonstrates how far ahead of her time she was. It must be remembered that many Victorian women were complicit in their subjugation, propping up male-dominated institutions that kept them down and shunning women who objected.
As Lotten suffered from a painful and debilitating ailment of the ear, triggered by a bout of scarlet fever in adolescence, she had been advised to consult Dr William Wilde, one of Europe’s leading aural specialists. She and her father, Baron Robert Fredrik von Kraemer, Governor of Uppsala, arrived at lunchtime one Sunday in July 1857. They were surprised to learn, by means of a wink and a nod that the lady of the house was not yet up. Instead, they were shown into William’s study. He arrived, holding one ‘unruly little boy’ by the hand and carrying a smaller boy in his arms. This was Oscar, not yet three, with ‘curly brown hair and large dreamy eyes’. Lotten was moved by the warm affection William showed towards his sons.46
Hospitable as ever, William invited these visitors to return for dinner. In the meantime, he volunteered his wife to take them on a tour of Dublin, which she did with great good humour. Willie and Oscar were present that evening, a highly unusual practice in a Victorian household and one that was to continue when Oscar had sons of his own. William stroked little Oscar’s cheek and sent him to fetch a book, while Jane prevailed upon Baron von Kraemer to teach her the rudiments of Swedish. Lotten admired her ‘soulful and captivating vivacity’, recognising that the fire in her glance betrayed her past as a revolutionary poet. She was struck by the affability of the occasion and the exceptionally congenial bond that existed between husband and wife.
Lotten and Jane had much in common. During her lifetime, Lotten was a published poet, essayist, and editor of Var Tid (Our Time), a magazine of modern culture. She also endowed a scholarship enabling female medical students to attend Uppsala University; she founded Samfundet De Nio (the Nine Society), a prestigious and progressive Swedish literary society; and she provided vital finance to the Country Association for Women’s Suffrage. Although early correspondence was taken up with medical advice passed on by William, much of it involving the application of leeches, Lotten and Jane were soon discussing topics of mutual interest: literature, culture and the position of women in society. It impressed Jane that:
Clever and intellectual women, also, in Sweden hold a much higher position in society than their literary sisters in England. They are honoured and made much of, and treated with considerable distinction, solely from belonging to the peerage of intellect. Whereas in England wealth, with the ponderous routine of life that wealth entails, seems to be the chief measure of merit and the highest standard of perfection in social circles.47
Ever the linguist, she attempted to master Swedish but the lack of a tutor obliged her to struggle alone with the aid of a dictionary. Although she managed a few letters, she never mastered the language: ‘Even this endeavour [learning Swedish] I have given up with all other literary employment since the cares of a household have come on me’, she told Lotten.48 One ambition Jane did not abandon was that of instilling a love for literature in her children; she was successful in this. While Willie enjoyed Tennyson’s epic ballad, Lady Clare, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha, Oscar remembered Walt Whitman’s recently published collection, Leaves of Grass (1855) being read to him. He mentioned this when he met its author in New Jersey in 1882. Once Willie turned six, Jane hired an English governess, an arrangement that allowed her to travel with William: ‘without this, we’re apt to fossilize in married state’ she declared.49 During the autumn of 1859, they toured Scandinavia. Jane said of Stockholm, ‘I will never enjoy any place again so much’.50 She was less taken with Germany, concluding, erroneously as it happened, that people ‘who live on beer and cheese, are not, and never can be, politically dangerous’.51
Years later, Jane organised her journals into Driftwood from Scandinavia, a moderately successful travel book in which she expressed her admiration for the elevated status of women in Swedish society. Through Lotten, Jane met Rosalie Olivecrona, a pioneer of the Swedish women’s rights movement and co-founder of Tidskrift för Hemmet (Journal for the Home), a campaigning feminist publication ‘devoted to general literature and the advancement of women politically and intellectually’. What impressed Jane about Rosalie was that, although she held ‘a very important place in the highest circles of Stockholm society’, she remained ‘with all her learning, a most attractive and elegant woman in style, look, and manner’.52
Although Jane told Lotten that she had ‘little time for writing or even for thought,’ she managed to complete all three volumes – 1,446 pages – of The First Temptation; Or, “Eritis Sicut Deus”: A Philosophical Romance [by W. Canz]. Translated from the German by Mrs. W. R. Wilde.53 Her skills as a translator were lauded, but this odd and controversial book received mixed reviews, although one damning assessment was motivated by revenge, as would become apparent. Jane enjoyed her status as a public figure and began one very revealing letter to Lotten: ‘When my correspondence is collected and published after my death …’ Yet, the incompatibility of literary and family life concerned her: ‘After all writing is a fatal gift for a woman’, she told Lotten, who was childless, ‘I would be a much better wife, mother, & head of a household if I never touched a pen. I feel this so strongly that I shall never encourage my daughter to authorship’.54 Such misplaced guilt remains familiar to her contemporary counterparts.
When Jane learned that her Swedish friends hosted regular literary receptions, she decided to establish ‘weekly conversazione’ in order to ‘agglomerate together all the thinking minds of Dublin’.55 The Athenaeum described 1 Merrion Square as ‘the first, and for a long time the only, bohemian house in Dublin’, but expressed concern that Jane had gathered together all those ‘whom prudish Dublin had hitherto kept carefully apart’.56 The Irish Times attributed her success to an absence of snobbery, ‘so fatal to social gatherings in Ireland’.57 Delighted with her initiative, Jane became determined to live up to her maxim; one Oscar adapted and made his own. ‘It is monotony that kills, not excitement,’ she wrote:
Dull people fail in the will to live, and so they soon lose their hold on life. Excellent good women, who give up society and devote themselves exclusively to home and homely duties, grow old so soon.58
As was her wont, she invited mostly men and those few women she admired: novelist Rosa Mulholland Gilbert, and literary sisters Alice and Henriette Corkran. Gilbert remembered Jane: ‘dressed in long flowing robes of Irish poplin and Limerick lace … adorned with gold chains and brooches modelled on the ancient ornaments of Erin’s early queens’. She considered Jane to be ‘of a kindly nature, and warm and sincere in her friendships,’ adding, ‘she had a commendable desire to make her house a social centre for all who were engaged in intellectual pursuits, or interested in literature or the arts’.59 Henriette Corkran thought her ‘an odd mixture of nonsense, with a sprinkling of genius’, and declared that ‘her talk was like fireworks – brilliant, whimsical and flashy’.60 In time, Oscar’s conversation would also be likened to fireworks.
Domestic matters dominated by May 1862. The children all had whooping cough and the family spent a few miserable weeks in Connemara. As Willie’s illness lingered throughout the summer, Jane took the children to the seaside resort of Bray, where William owned four adjoining houses on the seafront. Oscar was poorly by Christmas and spent five weeks in bed with fever. They returned to Bray in April, this time accompanied by a new Swiss governess. Jane was concerned about Willie, who was almost eleven and very clever but excessively high-spirited: ‘tho’ he obeys me, [he] will scarcely obey a governess,’ she told Lotten, ‘I feel it would be a risk to leave him’.61 She saw great promise in Oscar: ‘Willie is alright,’ she told the poet George Henry Moore, ‘but as for Oscar, he will turn out something wonderful’.62
In January 1864, William was knighted in recognition of his services to the medical profession and his key role in compiling census statistics. Without hesitation, Jane became Lady Wilde. In February, she sent Willie, aged twelve, and Oscar, who was only nine, to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, a prestigious boarding school by Irish standards, located 100 miles north of Dublin. This move coincided with a revival of her literary fortunes and the publication of Poems by Speranza, which she dedicated ‘to Willie and Oscar’:
I made them indeed, speak plain the word COUNTRY. I taught them, no doubt, that a country’s a thing men should die for at need!63
Her slim volume was well received; The Dublin Review paid tribute to the ‘extraordinary influence’ her poems had ‘on all the intellectual and political activities of Young Ireland’.64 Such contentment was fleeting and the year that started with such promise closed with public humiliation. The roots of this turmoil stretched back to before Oscar’s birth, when Dr William Wilde began treating an attractive young woman for a hearing complaint.