Every word Oscar Wilde published — the novel, the plays, the poems, the essays, the fairy tales, and the two masterpieces he wrote in disgrace — in a single authoritative edition.

Oscar Wilde lived two lives simultaneously: the most celebrated wit in Victorian London, and a man whose inner life was at war with everything the society around him demanded. He understood, better than almost anyone before or since, that style is not decoration but argument — that how you say something is inseparable from what you are saying. He paid for that understanding with two years in Reading Gaol and three years of exile before dying in a Paris hotel room at forty-six.

This edition collects the complete works across six parts.

The Fiction: The Picture of Dorian Gray — the only novel Wilde completed, a Gothic fable about beauty, corruption, and the price of living without consequences — together with the fairy tales of The Happy Prince, A House of Pomegranates, and the stories of Lord Arthur Savile's Crime.

The Drama: All eight plays, including The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and Salomé — the full range from drawing-room comedy to symbolist tragedy.

The Essays: The Soul of Man under Socialism, Intentions, and the critical writings in which Wilde constructed his aesthetic philosophy with the same precision he brought to his epigrams.

The Poetry: The complete poems, including The Ballad of Reading Gaol — written after prison, the only work in which Wilde dropped the mask entirely.

De Profundis: The long letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol — part accusation, part elegy, part self-examination — which remains one of the most extraordinary documents in English literature.

The Aphorisms: Wilde's maxims and epigrams, the compressed philosophy of a man who understood that a well-turned sentence could do the work of a paragraph.

✦ The complete works across all genres — fiction, drama, poetry, essays, and letters

This edition also includes: ✦ Literary Analysis: Wilde's aesthetic philosophy, the Gothic tradition, the comedy of manners, and the symbolist drama ✦ Historical Context: The Victorian world, the Aesthetic Movement, Decadence, and the legal architecture of Victorian morality ✦ Biography in ten parts: from Dublin and Oxford through the conquest of London, the golden years, the trial, Reading Gaol, and the exile — edited by Henry Bugalho, 2026

For readers who enjoy: ✦ Oscar Wilde's complete works including The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest ✦ Victorian and Edwardian literary fiction and drama ✦ Women's literary fiction and the great comedies of manners ✦ Works by Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, and the tradition of the aesthetic novel

To define is to limit. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray