BORN TO BE WILDE

"TO love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance," Oscar Wilde once declared.

- MARION MCMULLEN LOOKS AT THE TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF THE WRITER AND WIT

The writer of works like The Importance Of Being Earnest, The Picture Of Dorian Gray and An Ideal Husband was a flamboyant figure during the Victorian era with his flowing locks and eye for fashion.

He favoured everything from cravats to fur-trimmed coats and often wore a green carnation as a buttonhole, but Oscar said during a lecture tour in America: "Fashion rests upon folly. Arts rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is fashion really. A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months."

Born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde in Ireland, he came from a wealthy background. His father William was knighted when Oscar was nine. His mother was named Jane but delighted in writing under the eye-catching pen name Speranza Francesca and claimed Italian poet Dante as an ancestor.

Oscar studied at Trinity College in Dublin before heading to Oxford University when he was in his early 20s. He later said "My Irish accent was one of the things I forgot at Oxford".

He quickly became a famous figure in London society and was as renowned for his quick wit as his stage hits, issuing a seemingly endless stream of pithy lines, such as "Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much."