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Short Stories by Oscar Wilde: book review


Short Stories (2003 Bilingual version) by includes three stories: The Happy Prince, The Canterville Ghost, and The Model Millionaire. The Happy Prince is from Oscar Wilde’s first collection of fairy tales published in 1888. The Canterville Ghost and The Model Millionaire are included in his second short story collection published in 1891, although both were written in 1887.

The Happy Prince is a very short tale about a statue (presumably in London). It is an unhappy but beautifully gilded and bejewelled statue. The story is also about the statue’s relationship with a bird – a swallow. At the onset of winter all of the swallows fly to the warm climate of Egypt, except one. The statue asks the little swallow to stay with him. So the remaining swallow stays to undertake tasks, such as helping the poor, as the statue demands.

The Canterville Ghost was Wilde’s first published story. An American family buy a mansion in Canterville Chase in England. The previous owner, the Dowager Duchess of Boston, had been haunted by its ghost for the past 50 years, but this does not deter the Otis family – until their fifteen-year-old daughter Virginia is missing. This is delightfully funny, mostly due to the antics of the Otis twin boys, nicknamed Stars and Stripes.

In The Model Millionaire Hughie Erskine is in love with Laura Merton, but her father, a wealthy baron, forbids their marriage because Hughie, although charming, is poor. Mr. Merton tells him that when he has 10,000 pounds he can marry his daughter. But how does he get 10,000 pounds?

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), crossed the channel to England in 1874. Initially he wrote poems, essays, and short stories, until his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890. I think it’s interesting to read his early works – his short stories – mainly written for magazine readers. Even The Picture of Dorian Gray was initially serialized in the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine before it appeared in book form in 1891.

The stand-out story in this collection, I think, is The Canterville Ghost, while the other two are short additions – although The Happy Prince is exceptionally well-known and has been interpreted in many productions for more than 100 years (and as recently as 2014).

MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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