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De Profundis Kindle Edition

by Oscar Wilde (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 333 ratings

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While imprisoned in Reading Gaol from 1895 to 1897 for homosexual practices, Oscar Wilde wrote "De Profundis", an impassioned letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. In the first section of the letter, Wilde records his relationship with Douglas in merciless detail; he rails against his lover’s selfishness and extravagance, accuses him of being the agent of Wilde’s destruction, and turns a cold eye on his own behaviour. The letter’s tone changes from bitterness to resignation as Wilde acknowledges his own responsibility for his fate and extends a hopeful offer for a renewed, calmer friendship.

First published in 1905 by an arrangement between Oscar Wilde and Robert Ross, who visited Wilde at Reading and later became his literary executor, "De Profundis" is a curious document: part apologia, part aesthetic discourse, part religious testimonial, part retort to religion, a letter that addresses a private recipient and was written for public view, but that despite these layers of performance has a strange inward quality; in reality this is a letter from Wilde to himself.

Editorial Reviews

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"Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, delivers his own moving introduction, and Simon Beale narrates the book-length letter as though he were talking about his own life...Beale manages the difficult emotional transitions...Beale never lets the leaps seem strained or unnatural. This is a reading that the work deserves. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award."

-- "AudioFile"

"Displays the insight, honesty, and unselfconscious style of a great writer."

-- "W. H. Auden, Anglo-American poet"

About the Author

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was born in Dublin. He won scholarships to both Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was heavily influenced by the radical aesthetics of Walter Pater. Flamboyant wit and man-about-town, Wilde had a reputation that preceded him, especially in his early career. After publishing two volumes of short stories between 1887 and 1891, his social-comedy plays such as Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest established his critical and commercial success. In 1895 Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual conduct and died in Paris in obscurity a few years after his release.

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4.4 333 ratings

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Oscar Wilde
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Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford where, a disciple of Pater, he founded an aesthetic cult. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and his two sons were born in 1885 and 1886.
His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and social comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), established his reputation. In 1895, following his libel action against the Marquess of Queesberry, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and his confessional letter De Profundis (1905). On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900.
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W. H. Auden
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4.4 out of 5

333 global ratings

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melina

great

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2024

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i love this book and the book was great quality

One person found this helpful

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@HectorGActor

A True Classic Must-read

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2023

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Wilde clearly and succinctly details how two years in prison permanently transformed his entire life, his thinking, his beliefs, and his art. Every sentence is carefully placed and contains a wealth of insight, inspiration and peace. Given his circumstance at the time of this writing, what surprised me most was his new-found joy in life and nature.

2 people found this helpful

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MAMO-CHAN

The Great Irish Writer Oscar Wilde!

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2015

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I love Oscar Wilde. i bought this book as a gift. I hope to find time to reread it before the birthday arrives.

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Diana S. Long

Reflections

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2020

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. The title of this work/letter expresses best the content “a heartfelt cry of appeal expressing deep feelings of anguish or sorrow”. Oscar Wilde in his own words expresses his deepest anguish at his fall from being, as he puts it best “from the pedestal to the pillory” Humiliated and brought so low to be dressed in prison garb and handcuffed, exposed to the masses to be laughed at and jeered. Imprisoned for two years from May 1895 until May 1897 Wilde not only lost his fortune, his mother and his two sons but also was exiled to France, lost his love for writing and died in some obscure dirty hotel only three years later. He wrote this letter near the end of his confinement and it's filled with reflections and hope. He does not ask for pity, nor does he claim to be innocent of all guilt but neither does he take all the burden of what he was found guilty of. I found it to be a most revealing and captivating work. From what I have read I deduced, if any one would have died from a broken heart it would be this man. Unfortunately Wilde died at only aged 46 and it would be another 117 years until he would receive a pardon, that's something at least. One of the most brilliantly written classics “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, it would be read and appreciated by millions and it's his lasting legacy. We don't remember all those that brought him low but we remember the literary genius he was.

16 people found this helpful

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Ilan kutz

Stunning tale of transformation

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2015

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The sad and illuminating search for the self and the soul of one of the world's literary geniuses. Here is an artist who having gone through the shadow of humiliation worse than death, emerges with new insights of who he is, of what Art is, and of the role of love in understanding what being human is all about.
As compelling as it is jaw-dropping.

9 people found this helpful

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Kenneth E. Baxter

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2017

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I thought that I would enjoy it more, but I only got thru about 10% of the book

One person found this helpful

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KindleCustomer451

Wilde

Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2015

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Another classic - not subject to words that describe novels or modern lit. In my opinion, one would do best to be familiar with Wilde as a literary figure to see the differences between these writings and his other works.

6 people found this helpful

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Paul Vitols

Personality disorders of the rich and literary

Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2015

This small book of selected works shows the depths of both Wilde's thought and his suffering, all expressed in effortlessly fluent language.

I came to this book by way of the Wikipedia entry on Wilde, which I consulted after reading his "The Picture of Dorian Gray". I was most intrigued to learn that he had written a long, searching letter while in prison, and was eager to read it. What were the thoughts and feelings of this perceptive man, who had undergone such a severe reversal of fortune?

I was to learn those things, but, being the kind of reader I am, I started this collection of works at the beginning, with Wilde's 1891 essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism." Knowing nothing much about Oscar Wilde, I didn't know that he had written about socialism, and was most surprised to discover that he looked forward to the arrival of socialist society as bringing a great advance in individual liberty and personal fulfillment. He regarded the mundane tasks of economic life as dehumanizing, and therefore they were appropriately to be taken on by the state, that its citizens might then enjoy more leisure, which is a prerequisite for civilized life. And how would the state be able to keep its citizens on a living dole? That is, who would be doing all that dehumanizing work? His answer was simple and prescient: machines. The right person to do dehumanizing work is a nonhuman. In this, Wilde was anticipating such thinkers as Adler and Kelso, who also, in their 1958 book "The Capitalist Manifesto," advocate a society whose citizens have been emancipated from toil. They see capitalism, not socialism, as the pathway to that emancipation, but then they enjoy the advantage of having witnessed the sobering reality of the 20th century's various attempts to create a socialist utopia. Wilde gives the impression of regarding the details of wealth-creation as too tedious to occupy the minds of anyone but bureaucrats; Adler and Kelso perceive the danger of concentrating all economic as well as political power in the hands of just a few men. The key point is that Wilde saw the central importance of these issues for society, although he was writing almost 70 years before those later thinkers.

Wilde's central concern is that people should lead lives of dignity and fulfillment. They should be themselves. I have no doubt he would have agreed thoroughly with another thinker whose ideas he anticipates: Abraham Maslow, who stressed the importance of self-actualization, the final and highest of human needs. For Wilde, the type of the self-actualized person is the artist, whose calling is exactly to express who he is. Wilde was the originator of an artistic mini-movement known as Aestheticism, which was concerned with turning one's own life into a work of art. He thought that a socialist society, more than any other type of society, could be one in which people would have the greatest opportunity to live in this (to his mind) fulfilling way.

I was impressed with the range and depth of Wilde's thought as I read this essay. He was a thinker who addressed the Great Ideas, who had original and perceptive contributions to make to what the Great Books people call the Great Conversation of Western civilization. He writes with a kind of effortless, detached passion. He is famous for his epigrams, especially the witty ones ("the good ended happily and the bad ended unhappily—that is what fiction means"; "if this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any"), and one sees how his style of thought and writing lead naturally, so to speak, to their formation. They arise where perceptiveness, brevity, and irony join in the mind of one who has a command of language. His prose, indeed, reads almost like a series of epigrams, and sometimes I found myself wishing for more of the train of thought that led to these sharp summary statements. But there is no denying his power and vigor as both a thinker and a writer.

Skipping the dialogue called "The Decay of Lying," I moved on to the main course, "De Profundis," a title bestowed by Wilde's ex-lover Robert Ross on the long letter composed by Wilde to another ex-lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, from Reading Gaol where Wilde was immured. It is a letter of complaint about how his relationship with Douglas had led to Wilde's ruin. Written, under prison rules, a single page at a time, it is a testament to Wilde's powers of organization and retention, as well as to his fluency, for apparently corrections to the manuscript were few. But the contents do not reflect well on either man. For while Wilde succeeds in portraying Douglas as the worst kind of parasite, narcissist, and ingrate, he also inadvertently reveals himself to be a patsy and a fool. Based on Wilde's description of his behavior, I had little doubt that today the young Lord Douglas would be diagnosed with the narcissistic personality disorder or something like it, while Wilde himself would probably be diagnosed with the codependent personality disorder. Wilde's letter is a long and, one realizes, futile effort to awaken some sense of contrition in Douglas for the many wrongs he did to his lover. Like Charlie Brown, who never learns that Lucy is going to yank the football away yet again before he can kick it, Wilde never learns that must expect only humiliation, not gratitude or reciprocation, from his young friend. What is sad is that even by the end of his letter he has not learned this; disgrace, bankruptcy, and incarceration have not been enough to drive home the message.

At the end of the book is a collection of 11 short poems and the longer "Ballad of Reading Gaol," a somber and knowing account of prisoners' reactions when one of their number goes to the gallows. Although I'm not a connoisseur of verse, I enjoyed this very much.

In all, this book is a collection of provocative and well-written pieces by a complex and brilliant man. Oscar Wilde was a true artist by his own definition of that term: "a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself."

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Top reviews from other countries

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Eduardo Duque

Buena introducción 👌

Reviewed in Mexico on November 28, 2023

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Buena compilación de cartas que dan contexto al escrito central 'De Profundis' y, cuya introducción permite entender la situación tan compleja y que termina por derrumbar internamente algo en Wilde.

Excepcional 👌

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Martina

Beutiful book, well edited edition

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 25, 2023

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I really liked this edition, I think it's one of the best because it's very useful and it explains a lot of Wilde's life, his friends and family and the period of the time. I bought it because I needed a De Profundis version to quote in my thesis and this helped me a lot, especially the introduction! I'm very satisfied and the prices on Amazon are always good.
(Ps sorry for my english!)

Amazon Customer

Not Oscar Wilde’s letter.

Reviewed in the Netherlands on March 12, 2021

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This is a misleading scum. I bought this thinking I’m buying Oscar Wilde’s letter from prison. This isn’t it. I kept going back and forth to my print copy trying to understand what is going on with this one. This isn’t the letter and it is even an amateur’s work too. It is even so badly spaced that you cannot reading without hurting your brain.

Ricardo Gaitán Pacheco

Incompleto

Reviewed in Spain on November 26, 2020

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Faltan las paginas de la 6 ala 11!!!

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