Product Description

These special fairy tales, which Oscar Wilde made up for his own sons, include 'The Happy Prince', who was not as happy as he seemed; 'The Selfish Giant', who learned to love little children; 'The Star Child', who suffered bitter trials when he rejected his parents. . . . Often whimsical and sometimes sad, they all shine with poetry and magic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60046 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, <I>The Happy Prince</I> (1888), <I>Lord Arthur Savile's Crime</I> (1891) and <I>A House of Pomegranates</I> (1891), together with his only novel, <I>The Picture of Dorian Gray</I> (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies – <I>Lady Windermere's Fan</I>, <I>A Woman of No Importance</I>, <I>An Ideal Husband</I> and <I>The Importance of Being Earnest</I>, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895. Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote <I>The Ballad of Reading Gaol</I>. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.

Customer Reviews

A Beautiful Book
Oscar Wilde shows his skill in writing these simple, yet funny, moving and clever stories. Guaranteed to soften even the hardest heart.

Very sad
I'm not actually certain that I would give these stories to a child to read - they are all so very sad. The one with the happiest ending is The Selfish Giant, and even then he dies, if not quite as tragically as the protagonists of the other stories! Knowing what I do about Wilde's own life and death, I was on the lookout for reflections in the stories: but in fact what there is is rather surprising - The Selfish Giant is an explicitly Christian allegory, and The Remarkable Rocket, full of his own pretension, arrogance and snobbery, eventually terminally expends his considerable talents and energies in such a way that nobody notices.

These are uncomfortable stories, and should only be read by children (and perhaps even adults) under strict supervision.

a classic
School doing this for the play so bought to read to my 2 boys (8 and 11). Of its time, the Happy Prince is a morality tale of sorts about being unselfish to the point of martydom and with a christian message: The broken prince statue and dead swallow whilst dumped on the scrap heap by the shallow town's councilors are taken to heaven by Angels: "Bring me the two most precious things in the city," said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.
"You have rightly chosen," said God, "for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me." You get the idea. The edition is beautiful and there are other tales to be read, just haven't got round to them yet....