Books: Homogenius

OSCAR WILDE AND THE YELLOW 'NINETIES—Frances Winwar—Harper ($3.50).

"To love oneself," said Oscar Wilde, "is the beginning of a life-long romance." Few have had such queerly spectacular romances with themselves as Oscar Wilde had. And none has been more queerly written about. Belligerently broadminded, owlishly psychiatric, sermonizing or smirking, Wilde's biographies for 40 years have been only slightly less perverted than Wilde himself.

A really good Wilde biography—i.e., candid, sensitive, objective—is Frances Winwar's Oscar Wilde and the Yellow 'Nineties. Readers may find something reminiscent of Wildean paradox in the fact that a woman...