Constance lloyd and oscar wilde
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Constance Wilde
Author, wife of Oscar Wilde (1858–1898)
"Constance Lloyd" redirects here. For the New Zealand artist, see Connie Lloyd.
Constance Mary Wilde (née Lloyd; 2 January 1858 – 7 April 1898) was an Irish writer. She was the wife of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde and the mother of their two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.
Early life and marriage
[edit]The daughter of Horace Lloyd, an Anglo-Irish barrister, and Adelaide Barbara Atkinson, who had married in 1855 in Dublin, Constance Lloyd was born at her parents' home in Harewood Square, Marylebone, London.[1] Registration of births did not become compulsory until 1875 and her parents omitted to do this.[2]
She married Wilde at St James's Church, Paddington on 29 May 1884.[3] Their two sons Cyril and Vyvyan were born in the next two years.
In 1888, Constance Wilde published a book based on children's stories she had heard from her grandmother, called There Was Once. She and her husband
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Oscar & Constance: a love story
On this day in 1884, Oscar Wilde wrote a letter to his good friend Thomas Waldo Story – sculptor, art critic, poet and literary editor – from the Royal Victoria Hotel in Sheffield, where he was lecturing at the time.
In this letter, he described in glowing and playful terms the young woman to whom he had become engaged weeks earlier:
Her name is Constance and she is quite young, very grave, and mystical, with wonderful eyes, and dark brown coils of hair: quite perfect except that she does not think Jimmy [Whistler] the only painter that ever really existed: she would like to bring Titian or somebody in by the back door: however, she knows I am the greatest poet, so in literature she is all right: and I have explained to her that you are the greatest sculptor: art instruction cannot go further.
We are, of course, desperately in love.
Constance Lloyd before her marriage to Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde married Constance Lloy
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The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde
London in the 1880s was a city where a woman could create a life of her own, socially, intellectually, and artistically. Art schools and galleries began to fill with young women, no longer satisfied with simply playing the muse, who desired to create. For a middle class of women who were neither required to work nor aristocratically obligated to marry, art offered both intellectual fulfillment and the possibility of a career.
These women were encouraged by the Aesthetics, a fashionable social set that included painters James MacNeil Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, actress Ellen Terry, and poet Charles Swinburne. It was a circle in which young Constance Lloyd found herself enthralled and seduced by its rising star, the critic, poet, and playboy Oscar Wilde, the twentieth century’s first pop culture celebrity.
Constance’s life with Oscar was brief — a little more than ten years as London’s most famous literary co