Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2025-26 series with a talk by Merlin Holland, the only grandson of famed writer Oscar Wilde, about his legendary grandfather.
The talk takes place on April 10 at 4:30 p.m. in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street. Holland will draw from his extensive research, family history, and newly published book, “After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal.”
The event is free and open to the public; tickets are required and are available to reserve in advance through University Ticketing, tickets.princeton.edu.
A biographer and editor, Holland lives in France. For the last forty years he has been researching his grandfather’s life and works and writes, lectures and broadcasts regularly on the subject. His publications include “Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess,” the first complete, verbatim record of the libel trial that ultimately brought Oscar Wilde to ruin and social disgrace, and “The Wilde Album,” a pictorial biography of Oscar Wilde that has now been translated into seven European languages.
He is also the co-editor of “The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde” as well as the editor of an abridged and commentated version of letters, “Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters.”
Holland’s new book sets out to show how Wilde “has caused even more trouble dead than alive.” The book traces the fluctuations in his reputation, the history of his surviving family, and the quarrels between his friends and enemies for decades after his death.
After Wilde’s criminal conviction in 1895, his wife, Constance, and their two sons were forced to move abroad and change their name to Holland. The family has never reverted to the name Wilde.
In reviewing his latest book, Kirkus Reviews noted that, “Holland’s tireless investigation debunks myths and lies, and reveals hypocrisy and homophobia among the British upper classes.”
The book was published in the U.K last year to strong reviews and will be launched in the U.S. on April 7, after which the author will begin a book tour across the country.
Holland will be available to sign his book after the talk, copies of which will be available for purchase.
The 2025-26 Fund for Irish Studies Series is co-chaired by Jane Cox, Director of Princeton’s Program in Theater & Music Theater, and Robert Spoo, Princeton’s Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters.
The Fund for Irish Studies, now in its 28th year, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of “Ireland in the world.” The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
The Fund for Irish Studies website lists more information about the series. The final event in this season’s series is on Thursday, April 23 at 4:10 p.m. in 50 McCosh Hall. Via Zoom, writer John Banville will present the opening keynote on “Fiction and the Dream” as part of the (De)Stabilizing Nabakov conference presented by Princeton’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and cosponsored by the Fund for Irish Studies.
