While a student at Oxford, Oscar Wilde was courting a beautiful Dublin girl, Florence Balcombe, and on Christmas Day 1876 he presented her with a love gift of a golden crucifix. Two years later, Florence surprised Oscar by suddenly marrying another young writer from Dublin, Bram Stoker, the future author of Dracula. Dutch writer Maarten Asscher uses that crucifix as a fulcrum to examine Wilde’s early development as an artist, from a seminal trip to Greece to his whirlwind tour of America and beyond, including real-life encounters with Walt Whitman and Arthur Conan Doyle. Asscher draws on the complete panoply of Wilde scholarship to supplement historical fact with imaginative reconstruction, including a myth-busting account of Wilde’s deathbed in Paris, and a fictional solution to the mystery of the crucifix delivered by none other than Sherlock Holmes. The result is a convincing and original interpretation of Victorian history, and a literary tour de force.
