That is a serious question to which the answer is partly embarrassing. My first encounter with Wilde was via The Importance of Being Earnest, because (*blushes*) it was the shortest text on our sixth year reading list. When I was in secundary school, I hated the classics of literature and lived on a diet of fantasy. Wilde was also more appealing than the average author on our reading list because of his trials and sentence for 'gross indecency'.
But I only really started to, well, shamelessly fangirl Wilde when one day, while browsing in my father's copy of the Complete Works, I happened to spot an instance in which Wilde refers to himself as Celtic - that was in De Profundis. I was at that point quite besotted with everything Irish and Celtic, and Wilde seemed to fit in that picture. Shortly afterwards I was in Paris and visited his grave at Père Lachaise. When I told a friend at university about my trip, she borrowed me H. Montgomery Hyde's biography of Wilde, and that was the beginning of an everlasting love affair ;-)... I hope that by writing a doctoral thesis I have sort of made up for the sordid beginnings XD.
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winterfish
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Date: Tuesday, 27 October 2009 09:07 pm (UTC)But I only really started to, well, shamelessly fangirl Wilde when one day, while browsing in my father's copy of the Complete Works, I happened to spot an instance in which Wilde refers to himself as Celtic - that was in De Profundis. I was at that point quite besotted with everything Irish and Celtic, and Wilde seemed to fit in that picture. Shortly afterwards I was in Paris and visited his grave at Père Lachaise. When I told a friend at university about my trip, she borrowed me H. Montgomery Hyde's biography of Wilde, and that was the beginning of an everlasting love affair ;-)... I hope that by writing a doctoral thesis I have sort of made up for the sordid beginnings XD.