Runs in the Family.

STONE, MARTHA E.

Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece

by Joan Schenkar

Basic Books. 400 pages, $30.

When Dolly (nee Dorothy) Wilde died at age 46, she was the same age as her father and her Uncle Oscar had been when they succumbed to the Reaper. The ghost of Uncle Oscar--whom she had never met, but who had paid the bill for her birth in 1895--dogged Dolly and affected her entire life. In her later years, she took to calling herself Oscaria. She was described as looking exactly like a female version of her uncle, especially when she dressed like him at the occasional private party.

Dolly was beautiful in the manner of an exotic hothouse blossom. She was witty, charming, and such a good listener that her many friends constantly craved her attention. She was also willful, impulsive, and careless about keeping appointments with those friends. Notably kind to maids and housekeepers, Dolly seems to have been afflicted by what we'd call seasonal affective disorder, and suffered from a variety of real and imagined ailments; in addition, she was suicidal, alcoholic, and addicted to drugs. When she died in 1941, she was also suffering from metastatic breast cancer.

Joan Schenkar's meticulously and lovingly researched biography of this peripheral member of the famous literary salon at 20 rue Jacob, which convened at that Parisian address for over fifty years, is an important addition to our knowledge of lesbian literary life. One can forgive the author her many repetitions of fact and tendency to psychoanalyze Dolly. But there's an elephant in the room that she never gets around to addressing: Did her friends love her for herself, or because she was Oscar Wilde's niece; or even, given her physical resemblance to her uncle, because they felt they were vicariously experiencing her uncle? Though Schenkar had access to people who could have helped answer these questions, this topic is not broached.

Schenkar calls Dolly a "born writer"; but sadly, Dolly left little evidence of this talent. She said she always wanted to write, but felt that nothing she wrote transmitted her real feelings. Her love letters did, however, and Schenkar had the good luck to discover 200 of them tucked away in an obscure library in Paris, among the collection of the over 40,000 letters that Natalie Clifford Barney had received during her life. Dolly never kept a journal, though she did figure as "Doll Furious" in Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack, the famous hand-illustrated satire of the Barney circle, and she made cameo appearances in various novels, including Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness. One of her World War I colleagues and lovers was Marian "Joe" Carstairs, who later declared that Dolly was one of the four women that had changed her life. Dolly merits her own chapter in Kate Summerscale's biography of Carstairs, The Queen of Whale Cay (Viking, 1997; reviewed in this journal's Fall 1998 issue). She had many male admir ers, some of whom were gay, like Victor Cunard and Osbert Sitwell, who were both grateful when their offers of marriage were turned down.

The American-born Natalie Clifford Barney had met Oscar Wilde when she was a child and he, on a speaking tour of the U.S., rescued her from some youthful bullies. Barney went on to be briefly engaged to Lord Alfred ("Bosie") Douglas and then to have an affair with Bosie's wife. Dolly met Barney after the First World War, during which she had served as an ambulance driver in France. Dolly Wilde was one of Natalie Clifford Barney's many lovers, and their thirteen-year relationship was an open one. Dolly often suffered knowing that Barney, to whom she was in thrall, had taken yet another lover. Not that Dolly, for her part, was always faithful, but it was Barney who paid the bills for Dolly's laundry list of medical specialists, quacks, and morphine-prescribers. Dolly and artist Romaine Brooks, another of Barney's lovers and her life partner after 1915, often commiserated with each other about some new girlfriend who was taking their place.

By the end of her brief life, Dolly was living in London with British music hall star Gwen Farrar (also an ex of Joe Carstairs). Her life was the stuff of lavish historic movies--even if the salon at 20, rue Jacob, haunted as it was by the ghost of Oscar Wilde, has not yet made it to the silver screen.