SOURCE: Murray, Isobel. Introduction to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Oscar Wilde, edited by Isobel Murray, pp. 1-9. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1979.

In the following excerpt, Murray discusses the appeal of Wilde's stories “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime” and “The Canterville Ghost.”

Oscar Wilde's fairy-tales and stories have been translated into nearly every language, and have sold in their millions. They have been dramatized, made into films for cinema and television, adapted for radio and long-playing records. They have been transformed into cartoon films, made into children's opera, into ballets, into mime plays. Above all, the reading public has never ceased to demand his stories, and yet the critics have for the most part paid them very little attention, although story-telling was so fundamental an activity throughout his life.

When Wilde told a version of his poem in prose ‘The Artist’ to André Gide, he was deliberately illustrating...