Fantasies, Fantasias, and Fangirls: Wilde’s Fairy Tales and “New Women” Writers

William Andrews Clark Oscar Wilde Lecture

Lecture by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware

Oscar Wilde’s importance in the world of the theatre is, of course, unparalleled. His effect on Gothic fiction (and on queer fiction) has been equally profound, due to the popularity of his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. This talk, however, will suggest that his fairy tales have been just as influential, and that their influence was clear almost immediately after the publication of both The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), especially in works by rebellious “New Women” of the 1890s. Irish and English writers such as “George Egerton” (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Mabel Nembhard, and Ella Erskine followed his lead in this form, while often turning their own storytelling in different directions, including feminist ones. Like his, their fairy tales were not for children, but for politically conscious adults. Though their names may be unfamiliar to readers today, these women helped to keep Wilde’s innovations and his literary reputation alive throughout his persecution by the British legal system and catastrophic fall from grace.

Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. Her previous positions were at Georgetown University and at the University of Virginia. She has been the author or editor of a number of volumes and of over 130 published essays on topics ranging from Victorian women’s comic fiction, to sexual violence during wartime, to the politics of animated films. Among her recent publications are chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press), Michael Field in Context (Cambridge University Press), and Neo-Victorian Decadence (DeGruyter/Brill), as well as articles in the journals The Henry James Review, Volupté, and Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. She has also been curator or co-curator of over a dozen exhibitions on late-Victorian print culture and art at museums, libraries, and galleries, including Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young (Grolier Club, NY, 2022) and Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity (New York Public Library, 2022–2023. In addition, she is a widely published poet.

The lecture is free to attend with advance registration. It will be held in-person at the Clark Library and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. No registration is required to watch the livestream.  Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.

Image: Nembhard, Mabel. Illustrated by Sambourne, Bowley, Gibson, and Reason. Fantasies (London: George Allen, 1896, First Edition). Courtesy of Prof. Margaret D. Stetz.