MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Sturgis offers a new and at times revelatory perspective on the life ... Through it all, the sheer precariousness of Wilde’s career is brought to life as never before ... The result – to use my students’ mot du jour – is a very \'relatable\' Oscar. This is welcome, up to a point ... The way that this perspective influences the organization of Sturgis’s account, though, gives rise to a problem ... uncoupling Wilde’s engaging epigrams wholly from the story of his life makes proceedings rather dry and at times strains the relationship between life and work. With the discussion of Wilde’s greatest literary works sequestered between lengthy accounts of his fecklessness, it’s almost a surprise to be reminded that he occasionally wrote things too ... the sources Sturgis chooses to use come predominantly from the first half of the last century, giving us a surprisingly strait-laced and buttoned-up Oscar. Not infrequent assertions that, until he was seduced by Robbie Ross, his life featured \'no trace of sexual deviancy, and little enough of sexual interest\', protest too much and betray an awkwardness around the whole subject ... As this indicates, Sturgis’s return to an earlier generation of research comes at the expense of sure-footedness among the burgeoning and vibrant recent scholarship on Wilde. Those \'new avenues\' that provide one of the biography’s main raisons d’être go largely unexplored, while the few that are explored yield some odd conclusions. The endnotes give the misleading impression that little of interest has been published on Wilde for quite some time...Perhaps Sturgis is attempting another rebalancing of the Wilde story, or at least trying to move beyond the image of Wilde as a gay icon. It isn’t convincing and it doesn’t work ... Unfortunately there are many more bibliographical omissions, familiarity with which could have corrected minor factual errors and supplemented the author’s understanding of Wilde’s personal relations...These critical repositionings of Wilde have revealed and contextualized his iconoclasm, and engaging with this research – subtly, selectively, to shape the insights here – could have made this good biography an outstanding one.
