Women Writers, Magazines, and the Making of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

Caroline Sumpter, “Women Writers, Magazines, and the Making of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales” (pp. 34–72)

This article is the first to show that key strategies in the fairy tales that have come to be seen as distinctively Wildean were pioneered by female writers and inspired by women’s magazines. Exploring both Wilde’s editorship of the monthly The Woman’s World and the publication of his fairy tale “The Young King” in the weekly Lady’s Pictorial, it recovers magazines as imaginative contexts for both Wilde and for the women readers activating his fairy tales. In the paratextual frame of the Lady’s Pictorial, Wilde’s readers were positioned as purchasers of colonial textiles and decorative objects as often as readers of fiction. Read as Wilde anticipated in 1888, alongside John Bernard Partridge’s illustrations, “The Young King’s” relationships with capitalism, empire, and race appear both unexpected and disconcerting. Revealing the close creative relationship between Wilde’s fairy-tale writing and his reviewing and editing of women magazine authors, this article shows the commercial as well as the political inspiration behind Wilde’s use of a socialist Christ, and recovers E. Nesbit and Olive Schreiner as major influences on some of Wilde’s best-known fairy tales.