Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was the leading wit and aesthete of late Victorian London, celebrated for comedies including The Importance of Being Earnest and for his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. He wrote Salomé in French in 1891; the Lord Chamberlain refused it a licence under the rule against depicting biblical figures on the English stage, and it premiered instead at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris in 1896, while Wilde was in prison. His 1895 convictions for gross indecency ended his career and cost him two years' hard labour. He died in Paris in 1900, not yet forty-six.