NED KELLY

REVIEW
Wilde Child
Oscar Wilde's niece was almost lost to history until a playwright found her.

by STEFFEN SILVIS
ssilvis@wweek.com

Dorothy "Dolly" Wilde was more than just the niece of Oscar Wilde--in many ways she was his double. She bore a striking resemblance to Oscar, so much so that she occasionally dressed as him, and would go by the name of "Oscaria." She possessed a rapier wit and quick mind, and she shared her uncle's taste for partners of the same sex. And her life ended as his; she even died at the same age as her uncle. But she died, according to her biographer, Joan Schenkar, as she lived: "vividly, rather violently, and at a very good address."

"It took me five years to write this book," Schenkar told WW. "I literally had to produce someone from thin air." Wilde was one of the principal bodies that orbited around Natalie Barney and her extraordinary literary salon in early-20th-century Paris. Wilde played "second lover" to Barney, after artist Romaine Brooks, and befriended and fought with such sapphic luminaries as Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes. But unlike her peers, Dolly Wilde wrote nothing but letters, leaving her to become a vibrant footnote at the bottom of published lives. "I couldn't bear that someone as vital as Dolly could so easily vanish from history," said Schenkar, "and I reject the notion that she wasn't an artist. She was." Schenkar began to track down the last surviving members of Barney's world to record their memories of Dolly before they were consigned to the grave.

Schenkar was the perfect choice for bringing life back to Dolly Wilde, and not only because she wields a sharp wit of her own. A noted experimental playwright (who still hasn't been produced in bucolic Portland), Schenkar intuitively understands the great theatricality in Dolly's character. "She was the opposite of her uncle in this: She loved to entertain small audiences," Schenkar says, "which, as an experimental playwright, I fully appreciate. My favorite audience is a hundred people."

As for not leaving a body of work behind except letters, Schenkar makes a valuable argument for Dolly's legacy. She equates her gifts to the work of an inspired cook, serving wit "as a matter of course, on the material at hand, and with some of the cruelty and brio for which cooks are known."

Those familiar with Schenkar's plays know that she often rifles history, giving new voices to historical characters. Everyone from Hitler to Barthes to P.T. Barnum has led a new life on Schenkar's stage. Even Barney was transformed in Schenkar's Between the Act. But in writing Dolly's biography, Schenkar experienced something new. "Rather than me speaking through Dolly, it felt as if she was using me to speak through," Schenkar admits. "A strange experience."

"Dolly gave me five great years," says Schenkar, and Shenkar has, in turn, given readers an excellent tour of a lost epoch.