185. Speranza, a.k.a. Oscar Wilde’s Mother

AMY: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my co-host, Kim Askew.

KIM: We’re so happy to have you joining us today to discuss a lost lady of lit who also birthed a literary genius.

AMY: He had nothing to declare except his genius, in fact. I think we all know who Oscar Wilde is. Not only did he write “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” novels like The Picture of Dorian Gray, and popular plays (both comedies and dramas) but he was also a media sensation in more ways than one. The Irish writer was caught up in a public scandal, yes, but he was also heralded for his sharp wit and bon mots. Zingers like “I can resist anything except temptation…”

KIM: And my personal favorite: “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” He would be a social media darling if he were alive today.

AMY: True. But Kim, I’d like to point to another line he wrote, in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” which factors into our subject today: “Every woman becomes their mother. That’s their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That’s his tragedy.”

KIM: Oh, interesting. Because I’m thinking about how clever and talented Oscar Wilde was, and surely that did not materialize in him from out of nowhere. Does the woman who raised him deserve any credit in shaping one of the greatest literary talents in the English language?

AMY: Considering she was a successful writer herself, I’m thinking the answer is yes! In fact, despite that line I just read from “The Importance of Being Earnest,” I think Oscar was very much like his mother. I’d go so far as to say she made him the man he was. 

KIM: Okay! So I’m excited to talk about her and (given that she’s a lost lady of lit) her own writing career.

AMY: Me, too. So let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[intro music]

AMY: Before we dive in on today’s lost lady, I’ll admit: I didn’t even know Oscar Wilde’s mother was a famous writer until I was listening to the Rest is History podcast’s episode on Oscar Wilde last year. They mentioned it in passing, and I was like, “Wait, what?”

AMY: Honestly, I didn’t even realize his mom was a writer until I was listening to The Rest is History podcast’s episode on Oscar Wilde last year. They mentioned it in passing, and I was like, “Wait, what?”

KIM: Yeah, I was totally clueless about this, too. So many lost ladies. So who was she, Amy?  

AMY: Well, her name was Lady Jane Wilde. But she wrote under the pen name Speranza.  

KIM: Ooooh.

AMY: I know I love saying that Speranza  in her lifetime. She earned the nicknames, the national poetess of Ireland, as well as Speranza of the nation.  So kind of a big deal. 

KIM: Yeah, sounds like it. 

AMY: Yeah, but that name was probably both because her writing spoke to her fellow country members and also because her work was very prevalent in an Irish newspaper that was called the nation.

Oh, okay. There you go. All right. So it was like a double entendre. Okay.  When you say Lady Jane Wilde, that sounds like she was some sort of  blue blood or nobility. Is that the case?

AMY: Not really. Her husband was knighted for his work in the medical field, which is how she gets the title. And she certainly leaned into being the lady, you know…

KIM:

As one would.

AMY: Yeah, if you give me that title, I'm going to live up to it. So,  um, the couple, they were definitely a celebrated couple in Dublin and upwardly mobile, but her Irish ancestors were pretty much working class, although her father was educated and an archdeacon and a solicitor, so fairly middle-class. He died when Jane was 3, and she was largely self-educated, impressively so. It is speculated that she probably knew around 10 languages, and she translated works from German and French in her 20s. But get this: Her uncle by marriage was Charles Robert Maturin who wrote Melmoth: The Wanderer. I know you would love that connection.

KIM: Totally. I absolutely love that. That's great. Oh my gosh.  Also in her 20s, she began to contribute prose and poetry to The Nation, as you mentioned, Amy. This was a weekly nationalist publication associated with the Young Ireland political movement for Irish Independence. It was basically THE go-to source for Irish radicals.

AMY: Right, and this is where we see that Jane (or Speranza as she was known by readers of this periodical) was a rebel at heart. She once said, “I should like to rage through life….ah, this wild rebellious ambitious nature of mine. I wish I could satiate it with Empires though a St. Helena were the end.” (a reference to Napoleon). She even briefly served as co-editor of The Nation alongside another female contributor after the male founders of the newspaper were jailed for treason.) 

KIM: So needless to say, she wasn’t writing “pretty ladies’ poetry” was she?

AMY: Not at all. Her writing was very political in nature — she wanted an armed revolution against the British. (It’s probably very good that she wrote under a pen name, let’s just say that.) Her words are quite stirring, if you’ll allow me to read a bit?

KIM: Yes, sure!

AMY: This is from a piece called “Jacta Alea Est” (or The Die is Cast)

Courage! Need I preach to Irishmen of courage?  Is it so hard a thing then to die Alas! do we not all die daily of broken hearts and shattered hopes …No! it cannot be death you fear; for you have braved the plague in the exile ship of the Atlantic, and the plague in the exile’s home beyond it; and famine and ruin, and a slave’s life and a dog’s death ; and hundreds, thousands, a MILLION of you have perished thus. Courage! you will not now belie those old traditions of humanity that tell of this divine God gift within us … Now is the moment to strike, and by striking save, and the day after the victory it will be time enough to count our dead …

KIM: Wow, that’s very “give me liberty or give me death!” Or St. Crispin’s Day speech.

AMY: Yes, very inflammatory, and this piece (written anonymously) resulted in The Nation getting suppressed by authorities. (The story goes that the editor of the Nation, Charles Gavan Duffy was arrested for writing the incendiary piece but that she stood up during his trial to admit that she’d written it. She was never prosecuted; maybe because she was a woman?)  But you can see why she’d have a massive following, too, right?  You can also see in the passage I read that she is also an advocate for the poor. She wrote a lot about famine and starvation, which would have been an unusual topic for verse. One of the poems she’s most well known for was printed in The Nation in 1847 as “The Stricken Land” (although it was later renamed “The Famine Year.” I’ll just read it here, and know that when she is speaking of “the stranger” she is referring to Britain.

WEARY men, what reap ye?–Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?–Human corses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing …
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

KIM: So no love for the Brits.

AMY: You can say that again. Although interestingly, she would later go live in London, later in life.

KIM: Okay. So she's writing this political poetry for the nation and advocating for the poor. Where does family life and Oscar's birth fit into all of this?

AMY: Well, The Nation eventually met its demise after being repeatedly shut down by authorities. When she was 29 she married William Wilde, who was a well-respected eye and ear surgeon (he, too, wrote books… nonfiction works on subjects including travel and archaeology). They were both considered to be brilliant, if unconventional. Jane was almost six feet tall, so quite statuesque, and her husband was a bit shorter, so they earned the nicknames “The Giantess” and “The Dwarf.”

KIM: People are so nice, aren't they?

AMY: If you Google her, you will see clear resemblance to Oscar; he takes after her, physically, for sure. So the couple had a son named William, the firstborn (he also grew up to be a writer… he was a journalist and poet, but also an alcoholic who ended up penniless), then Oscar was born and then their last child was a daughter who died at the age of 9. (Oscar carried a lock of her hair with him until he died.)

KIM: Heartbreaking.

AMY: From what I could tell, Jane adored her children and doted on them, AND, most importantly, she included them in this extremely intellectual household. They were allowed to converse with adults at the dinner table. She hosted these fantastic salons with all sorts of famous writers and artists and politicians;  the children were present at those. In fact, Oscar carried on his mother’s tradition by creating a similar salon-like atmosphere when he was attending Oxford University. Another thing I think we should remember, because he started getting published while still at Oscar (he won Oxford’s Newdigate prize): when starting out, he was invariably going to be compared to his mother, the great Speranza. He had to prove himself in his own right. And she was SO PROUD of him when he started having literary success. She collected newspaper clippings of his eventual tour of America. So she was a proud mama.

KIM: Awww, that’s so sweet! And we know that Oscar was an aesthete and had quite a flamboyant personality, and so, too, was his mother. Her favorite color to dress in was scarlet which scandalized the other ladies in her social circles.

AMY: Yes, she loved drama and spectacle and was a sort of larger than life persona by all accounts, and it seems like she could make up pithy comments at the drop of her hat just like her son. Also at a certain point in her life she started saying that her ancestors were from Tuscany and she could trace her lineage back to Dante Aligheri. And it was all a bunch of b.s., basically.

KIM: Ooh, fun! Good for her! I'm gonna start doing that.

AMY: She was also described at one point as making a habit of wearing a bunch of miniature portraits of her ancestors pinned to her chest, making her look like a walking family mausoleum.

KIM: As if I couldn’t love her more already.

AMY: She’d just be fun to be around.

KIM: I feel like she would. Well, speaking of drama, we know that Oscar would go on to be embroiled in a world-famous libel trial springing from his homosexual relationship, which led to the writer’s two-year imprisonment. At the time of his arrest, JAne reportedly said to her son: “"If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no difference to my affection, but if you go, I will never speak to you again." 

AMY: Yeah, so this is in regards to he kind of had the option, he could have Just avoided all of this by fleeing to France or somewhere and just gotten the heck outta Dodge.  and they probably wouldn't have pursued the case.   But yeah, she wanted him to be defiant and perhaps she was recollecting back to her own  public scandal and libel court case from her own past. They have that in common too.

KIM: Oh, do tell! I want to hear. What happened?

AMY: Okay, so it’s a bit of a soap opera but I’ll try to sum things up in a nutshell. A young family friend of the Wilde’s, 19-year-old Mary Travers, was a frequent guest at their home and was a patient of William Wilde. Jane and William Wilde claim she developed an obsessive attraction to William. Mary herself claimed that during an examination by William sometime in 1862 she lost consciousness (possibly chloroformed) and when she came to she realized he had raped her. (Two years later is when he would be knighted, remember). This young woman continued to associate with the Wildes, but her behavior became increasingly erratic. She tried to kill herself by drinking poison, she extorted money from William and later wrote a damning pamphlet which gave a fictionalized account of her version of events, making it clear that it was the famous “Speranza” whose husband had victimized her. She printed up a thousand copies and had them printed all over Dublin. This is just a small account of her campaign against the Wildes. Jane did not believe Mary’s story and was exasperated by the ongoing harassment from what she believed to be a clearly troubled young woman. She wrote to Mary’s father saying Mary was crazy and needed to knock it off, and to make a very long story short, Mary used this letter to sue Jane for libel. The six-day court case was a complete spectacle. Everyone was following it. Mary won the case, but she was only awarded one farthing plus the cost of court expenses. One thing I discovered was that the case actually bolstered Jane’s public reputation as most people following the case sided with her. I think post #metoo we might think differently. [True crime fans: This is an interesting Internet rabbit hole to go down.]

KIM: Wow. Fascinating and disturbing.  Later in her life, Jane was living in poverty because after her husband's death, 1876, she and her sons discovered that he was basically bankrupt.  It's like a Jane Austen novel, right? And she moved to London where Oscar was living and tried to support herself writing for magazines. So when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned in Reading Gaol, his mother tried to visit him there. She was suffering from bronchitis and near death. Her request was refused.

AMY: Everything about this is awful. Everything about This is awful. Oscar Wilde in jail is just horrible to read about. He actually claimed that he knew the moment his mother died because her apparition appeared in his jail cell. This was 1896. He was able to pay for her burial, but not for her headstone.So she was buried anonymously.   

KIM: It wasn’t until 1996 that she received a plaque honoring her on the gravestone of her husband, William Wilde. A few years later the Oscar Wilde Society honored her in the cemetery where she is buried with a Celtic Cross gravestone monument. 

AMY: And I think we should end this episode with another one of Jane Wilde’s poems because if you read this one while keeping in mind Oscar Wilde’s own tragic fate, this has real poignancy, I think. 

THE POET’S DESTINY.

THE Priest of Beauty, the Anointed One,

Through the wide world passes the Poet on.

All that is noble by his word is crown’d,

But on his brow th’ Acanthus wreath is bound.[Acanthus is a thorny plant)

Eternal temples rise beneath his hand,

While his own griefs are written in the sand;

He plants the blooming gardens, trails the vine—

But others wear the flowers, drink the wine;

He plunges in the depths of life to seek

Rich joys for other hearts—his own may break.

Like the poor diver beneath Indian skies,

He flings the pearl upon the shore—and dies;

KIM: It’s interesting that the “poet” in this verse is a “he,” because if you think about the griefs that Jane had in life, too, I think this could just as easily be about her, be about both of them.

AMY: Yeah, totally. Interesting life and interesting lady. So that’s all for today’s episode, everyone. If you’re a Patreon member, get ready to put on your dancing shoes! In next week’s bonus episode we’ll be exploring the revolutionary history of a scandalous new dance craze of 19th century Europe: The Viennese Waltz. 

Bye, everyone!

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew and supported by listeners like you.