Born in Dublin to artistically minded parents, Wilde studied for three years at Trinity College in Dublin, and then at Magdalen College in Oxford, where his tutors included the English art critic John Ruskin and the English essayist Walter Pater. At the age of twenty-four he moved to London, where he very quickly became a conspicuous figure on the social scene, celebrated for his wit, personality, and self-consciously foppish dress sense. He married in 1884, had two children, and then, within a couple of years, noticed that he was homosexual. He fell in love with Lord Alfred Douglas in the early 1890s, was repeatedly and publicly denounced by Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, until eventually Wilde sued for libel, and lost. This led to his trial and conviction for sodomy, and to a sentence...