Complete Short Fiction

This volume collects together the masterpieces that appeared during Wilde's earliest revolutions as an artist, the stories which first made his name as a writer of fiction. It includes the complete texts of The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), A House of Pomegranates (1891) and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891), together with his six Poems in Prose and 'The Portrait of Mr W.H.', inspired by 'the onlie Begetter' of Shakespeare's Sonnets, loved by Wilde 'as one should love all things, not wisely but too well'. Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction, comedies of manners - these stories find Wilde at work subverting late-Victorian expectations and trying out his own distinctive forms of melodrama and parody. They defy our modern expectations too in the brilliance of their vision and paradox and in the audacity of their wit.