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Review

400 pages, paperback
For sixty years she was a delicious rumor: Oscar Wilde's enchanting niece Dorothy. Born a scant three months after her uncle's notorious arrest and raised in the shadow of the greatest scandal of the turn of the 20th Century, Dorothy Irene Wilde died exactly as she lived: vividly, rather violently, and at a very good address.
A "born writer" who never completed the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination, Dolly Wilde was charged with charm, brilliantly witty, changeable as refracting light, and loaded with sexual allure. She made her career in the salons and in the bedrooms of some of London's and Paris' most interesting women and men. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, she drenched her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs, and created continuous sensations by the ways in which she seemed to be re-living the life of her infamous uncle.
In this revolutionary and very modern biography, Joan Schenkar provides a fascinating look at what it means to live with the talents but not the achievements of biography's usual subjects: those obliterating "winners" like Dolly's uncle Oscar whose stories have almost erased riveting histories like Dolly's own. And she uncovers never-before-published evidence of the hidden life of the Wilde family and of the extraordinary salon society of Natalie Clifford Barney, Dolly Wilde's longest and most fatal attachment.