Franny Moyle Read Online Free

secrets in their lives – men who have done some shameful things, and who in some critical moment have to pay for it … Don’t tell me you are such as they!’ With Oscar’s note in her hands, Constance must have wondered whether her husband’s play was about to prove some form of sickening rehearsal for their own impending drama. 14

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    The sunflower and the lily
    G IVEN HER OWN private ambitions towards Oscar Wilde, Constance must have been delighted to read in the newspapers, a year after they started seeing one another, that not only had her suitor’s fame now spread internationally but that he had apparently also made a fortune. She must, in the same instant, have been devastated to hear that another woman seemed destined to become the beneficiary of Oscar’s success.
    The January after their summer of flirtation Oscar had travelled to America to undertake a lecture tour. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience had opened in New York in September 1881, and within days of the fictional Aesthete Bunthorne delighting the American public, the opportunity to present the real thing was seized. An agent approached the producer of Patience , Richard D’Oyly Carte, who in turn cabled Oscar and proposed the tour. It was a massive enterprise that would see him travel the length and breadth of the United States and deliver readings on first ‘The English Renaissance of Art’, and then more fully on ‘The Decorative Arts’ and ‘The House Beautiful’.
    Constance had been delighted when the Wildes informed her about this important career break for Oscar the previous November. And regardless of quite how the tour had originated, Oscar’s response to it proved that beneath the long hair and aesthetic pose was a man of substance and hard work. ‘O.W. is going to be about 3 months in America firing 50 lectures and having all his expenses paid, not bad for him,’ Constance proudly noted to Otho. 1
    Far from a three-month tour, what Oscar embarked on would inthe end keep him away for a year. Adopting for real his own version of the velvet coat, knee breeches and silk stockings that had been designed for the fictional Bunthorne to wear on stage, Oscar was a hit with the American public. By September 1882 the gossip column of Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser noted with glee how Wilde had been
    so completely filling all America with his renown that the country is absolutely bursting … and can hold no more. So he is about to depart for Japan. He will first of all however visit the still unexhausted countries of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island … Apart from all the ridicule there is much to admire and to wonder at in Oscar Wilde’s career … He started from Europe, beneath the heavy burthen of ridicule … He was poor and dependent and laughed at. He has risen above every insult and condemnation and will return home filled with respect for his own capacity and justly proud of his own perseverance … He is rich by his own labour, and will be respected now in spite of the strange attire he assumes.
    But if this kind of report filled Constance’s heart with pride and hope, the intelligence it offered next must have dealt a hefty blow. ‘Moreover the great aim of his life is about to be accomplished (so folks declare) by a rich and laudable marriage with the daughter of the great American actress Julia Ward Howe. Miss Maud Howe was one of the beauties of the London season some three years ago, and obtained the honour of especial notice by one of the gallant sons of royalty.’ 2
    Until this point things had been going well for Constance from a romantic point of view. Right to the moment of his departure, her and Oscar’s mutual flirtation had been progressing, and although no correspondence between the pair while Oscar was overseas survives, 3 it seems likely Oscar would have been writing