Dancing with Salomé
Courting the Uncanny with Oscar Wilde & Friends
Nina Antonia
Trapart Books 2021
Pb, 130pp, £15, ISBN 9789198692006
Comprising five essays, each of which highlights esoteric aspects of Oscar Wilde’s fateful relationship with “Bosie”, aka Lord Alfred Douglas, this book, while slim, includes many surprising details new to this reviewer, despite some familiarity with Wilde’s triumphs and travails.
Constance Wilde’s membership of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, alongside Yeats, Machen and the included some of the Order’s ritual secrets, passed on to her husband by Constance. These were not to be shared among the profane on “pain of being paralysed without visible weapon”. Constance later became seriously ill with a spinal condition causing gradual paralysis. Both Oscar and Constance consulted society fortune-teller Mrs Robinson; she once told him: “I see a very brilliant life for you up to a certain point. Then I see a wall. Beyond the wall I see nothing.”
