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On 14 February 1895 The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St James’s Theatre in London. Seven weeks later its author was under arrest, and the play closed on 8 May after 83 performances. Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin in 1854, had by then written one novel, two books of fairy tales, a play in French that the censor would not let on to a London stage, and four society comedies, two of them running in the West End at once. On 25 May he was sentenced to two years’ hard labour. In prison he wrote a letter of about 50,000 words to Lord Alfred Douglas; after his release he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he died in Paris in 1900, aged 46. This guide covers his twelve key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1888–1905 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Oscar Wilde’s best-known books are The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his only novel, and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), the last of his four society comedies, followed by The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), Salome (1893), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and the prison letter De Profundis (1905). Start with Earnest: it is short, it is his funniest work, and every other book on this page reads differently once you know what happened in the weeks after it opened.
Where to Start with Oscar Wilde
If you have never read him
→ The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) — his funniest play and the fastest read.
If you want the book he is most famous for
→ The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) — his only novel.
If you want a comedy with real stakes
→ An Ideal Husband (1895) — a politician, a blackmailer and an old secret.
If you want to understand what the trials cost him
→ De Profundis (1905) — read it after the plays.
12 Oscar Wilde Books, in Order
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
Five fairy tales, published in 1888 with illustrations by Walter Crane and Jacomb Hood: “The Happy Prince”, “The Nightingale and the Rose”, “The Selfish Giant”, “The Devoted Friend” and “The Remarkable Rocket”. In the title story a gilded statue asks a swallow to strip off his gold leaf and jewels for the poor of the city, and the swallow stays too long to fly south.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A young man wishes his portrait would age instead of him, and it does: under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton he lives for pleasure while the painting by Basil Hallward records every cruelty, from the suicide of the actress Sibyl Vane to murder. It first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890, to reviews calling it “unclean” and “contaminating”; the 1891 book edition grew from thirteen to twenty chapters and added the famous preface. Passages were read against Wilde in court in 1895.
Read it as a horror novel about vanity, not a scandal novel about decadence — that’s the version that holds up. The prefatory aphorisms (“there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book”) are Wilde pre-emptively defending the book against exactly the reception it got. The portrait itself is one of the most effective images in Victorian fiction: a man’s conscience, externalized, rotting in an attic. It is on my shelf and it is the one book here that isn’t a comedy, which makes it essential context for everything else.
— LisanneThe Soul of Man Under Socialism
A long essay, first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891, arguing that charity only prolongs poverty and that society should be rebuilt “on such a basis that poverty will be impossible”. Wilde wants private property abolished not for equality’s sake but so that people are free to develop themselves, and he rejects any socialism run by an authoritarian state.
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories
Four light, comic stories first published in 1887 and collected in 1891. In the title story a palmist at Lady Windermere’s party sees murder in Lord Arthur’s hand, so he decides to get it over with before his wedding. The book also contains “The Canterville Ghost”, in which an American family buys an English country house and refuses to be frightened by its ghost.
A House of Pomegranates
His second book of fairy tales: “The Young King”, “The Birthday of the Infanta”, “The Fisherman and His Soul” and “The Star-Child”, published in 1891 with illustrations by Charles Shannon and decorations by Charles Ricketts. The stories are longer and more ornate than those in The Happy Prince; in the Infanta’s story a dwarf dances for a Spanish princess’s birthday, and dies when he sees himself in a mirror.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
His first society comedy, opened by George Alexander at the St James’s Theatre on 20 February 1892 and published in 1893. Lady Windermere suspects her husband of an affair with Mrs Erlynne, a woman with a past, without knowing that Mrs Erlynne is the mother who left her twenty years earlier. It is the play in which a cynic is “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. Ernst Lubitsch filmed it in 1925.
Salome
A one-act tragedy written in French in 1891 and published in Paris in 1893, with an English translation, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, in 1894. Salome dances for Herod and demands the head of the prophet Jokanaan, who rejected her. London rehearsals with Sarah Bernhardt stopped in 1892 when the Lord Chamberlain refused a licence, under the rule against biblical characters on stage; it was first performed in Paris in February 1896, while Wilde was in prison. Richard Strauss’s opera of 1905 is based on it.
A Woman of No Importance
Opened by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre on 19 April 1893 and ran for 113 performances. The witty, powerful Lord Illingworth offers young Gerald Arbuthnot a job as his secretary, who turns out to be his own son by a woman he abandoned some twenty years earlier. Reviews were mixed, and Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann called it the weakest of his 1890s plays.
An Ideal Husband
Sir Robert Chiltern, a rising politician admired by his wife for his integrity, made his fortune by selling a Cabinet secret about the Suez Canal; Mrs Cheveley has his letter, and wants him to back a fraudulent Argentine canal scheme. His idle friend Lord Goring sets things right. It opened at the Haymarket on 3 January 1895, kept running after Wilde’s arrest with his name removed, and was published without his name in 1899.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Jack Worthing calls himself Ernest in town; Algernon Moncrieff invents an invalid friend called Bunbury to escape to the country, where he poses as Jack’s brother Ernest; and Gwendolen and Cecily will only marry a man called Ernest. The answer lies in a handbag left at Victoria Station. It opened at the St James’s Theatre on 14 February 1895 and closed on 8 May, after Wilde’s arrest. It was filmed in 1952 by Anthony Asquith and in 2002 by Oliver Parker.
This is the one to read if you read only one Wilde play, and it is the one I’d press on anyone who thinks 19th-century comedy can’t still be genuinely funny on the page. Every line is doing double work — advancing the plot and detonating a small bomb under some Victorian virtue at the same time. The double life at the center of the plot reads very differently once you know what Wilde’s own double life cost him within months of the premiere.
— LisanneThe Ballad of Reading Gaol
A long poem about the hanging of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards executed at Reading on 7 July 1896 for killing his wife, while Wilde was a prisoner there. Begun in France after his release, it was published by Leonard Smithers on 13 February 1898 under the name “C.3.3.”, Wilde’s cell number. The first 800 copies sold out within a week. It contains the line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves”.
De Profundis
A letter of about 50,000 words to Lord Alfred Douglas, written at Reading Gaol between January and March 1897 and handed to Wilde on his release. Robert Ross published a shortened version in 1905, five years after Wilde’s death, with the passages about Douglas’s family removed. A full but faulty text followed in 1949, and a corrected text from the manuscript in The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962).
In What Order to Read Oscar Wilde
Nothing in Wilde continues from one book to the next, so read by mood rather than date. Publication order still tells a story: the fairy tales and the novel come first, then the four comedies between 1892 and 1895, then a gap of two years in prison, then two works written out of it. De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are best read last and together, once you know the plays.
The comedies can be read in any order, but The Importance of Being Earnest is the shortest way in and An Ideal Husband the natural next step. The fairy tales and the stories in Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime fit anywhere, as a change from the plays.
A reading path
1. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
2. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
3. An Ideal Husband (1895)
4. The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
5. De Profundis (1905)
Everything Else Oscar Wilde Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 10 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Poetry
4
4 books · 1878–1894
- 1878Ravennathe poem that won Oxford’s Newdigate Prize
- 1881Poemshis first collection
- 1894The Sphinxa long poem
- 1894Poems in Prosesix short prose poems, including “The Doer of Good”
Early plays
2
2 books · 1880–1883
- 1880Vera; or, The Nihilistshis first play, set in Russia; a London staging in 1881 was withdrawn
- 1883The Duchess of Paduaa verse tragedy
Criticism
2
2 books · 1889–1891
- 1889The Portrait of Mr. W. H.a story-essay about the young man of Shakespeare’s sonnets
- 1891Intentionsfour essays, including “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist”
Letters
2
2 books · 1962–2000
- 1962The Letters of Oscar Wildeedited by Rupert Hart-Davis, with the corrected text of De Profundis
- 2000The Complete Letters of Oscar Wildeedited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis
The years · 1854–1900
Quick facts about Oscar Wilde
- Known for
- Writing the most quoted comedies in English and one novel about a portrait that ages in its owner’s place, and for the trials of 1895 that sent him to prison for two years
- 1854
- Born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin
- 1882
- Lecture tour of the United States and Canada
- 1900
- Dies in Paris, 30 November
- Born
- 16 October 1854, 21 Westland Row, Dublin
- Education
- Trinity College Dublin; Magdalen College, Oxford (double first, 1878; Newdigate Prize for Ravenna)
- Married
- Constance Lloyd, 29 May 1884; sons Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886)
- Editor
- The Woman’s World, 1887–1889
- Imprisoned
- 1895–1897, two years’ hard labour for gross indecency; pardoned posthumously in 2017
- Died
- 30 November 1900, Hôtel d’Alsace, Paris, aged 46, of meningitis
- Buried
- Père Lachaise, Paris, since 1909, under a tomb by Jacob Epstein
The red mark is 1890: The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, first published in a magazine that July.
How Oscar Wilde Writes: The Paradox and the Plot
Wilde’s basic unit is the epigram: a sentence that takes a familiar idea and turns it inside out, so that the obvious moral is the one thing it does not say. In Lady Windermere’s Fan Lord Darlington defines a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”; the preface to Dorian Gray is a string of such lines, ending “All art is quite useless.” His comedies are built so that the idle, witty characters get the best of these, and the earnest ones are mocked for missing the joke.
Under the wit, the plots are borrowed from Victorian melodrama: a mother with a secret past, an illegitimate son, a blackmailer with an incriminating letter, a baby left in a handbag. Wilde keeps the machinery and lets the dialogue undercut it, which is why the comedies can be sentimental and satirical in the same scene. The fairy tales show the other side of the same writer: plain, sincere stories of self-sacrifice with no irony at all.
After prison the voice changes. De Profundis is a long, direct letter with almost no epigrams, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a ballad built on a single hanging and a repeated line. For writers with the same sharp wit and the same interest in surfaces, see Authors like Oscar Wilde.
Frequently asked questions about Oscar Wilde’s books
How many books has Oscar Wilde written?
Wilde wrote one novel, seven finished plays, three books of stories, a small number of poems and essays, a long prison letter and a long prison poem. This page lists his 12 key books, from The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) to De Profundis (1905), and ten further titles below them: his poetry, two early plays, his criticism and two editions of his letters.
What are Oscar Wilde’s books in order?
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891), A House of Pomegranates (1891), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Salome (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and De Profundis (1905). Plays are dated by their first performance.
Where should I start with Oscar Wilde?
The Importance of Being Earnest. It is his funniest work, short enough to read in an evening, and it shows his wit at full strength. The Picture of Dorian Gray is more famous, but darker and slower.
What is Oscar Wilde’s most famous book?
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his only novel, about a young man whose portrait ages and records his sins while he stays young. Of the plays, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is the most famous and the most performed.
Is The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde’s only novel?
Yes. It first appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890, and an expanded book edition, twenty chapters instead of thirteen and with a new preface, followed in April 1891. Everything else he wrote was plays, stories, poems, essays and letters.
What is the difference between Oscar Wilde’s four society comedies?
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) turns on a mother and the daughter who does not know her. A Woman of No Importance (1893) is about a lord who meets the son he never acknowledged. An Ideal Husband (1895) is a political blackmail plot. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) drops the secret-past melodrama of the other three and is pure farce, about two young men pretending to be called Ernest.
What should I read after The Importance of Being Earnest?
An Ideal Husband, which opened a few weeks earlier and uses the same wit on a plot with real consequences. Then The Picture of Dorian Gray for the darker side of his imagination, and De Profundis for the man behind the wit.
In what order should I read Oscar Wilde’s books?
Start with The Importance of Being Earnest, then The Picture of Dorian Gray, then An Ideal Husband. After those the order matters less: the fairy tales and stories fit anywhere. Read De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol last, as a pair, because both were written out of his imprisonment.
Why was Oscar Wilde sent to prison?
In February 1895 the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card at Wilde’s club accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but dropped the case during the trial in early April and was arrested on 6 April for gross indecency. The first criminal trial ended with a hung jury; at the second, on 25 May 1895, he was convicted and given the maximum sentence of two years’ hard labour. Passages from Dorian Gray were quoted against him in court.
Was Oscar Wilde pardoned?
Yes, posthumously, in 2017, under the so-called Alan Turing law, which pardoned men convicted of homosexual offences that are no longer crimes.
Was Salome performed in Wilde’s lifetime?
Once. A London production with Sarah Bernhardt was stopped in rehearsal in 1892, when the Lord Chamberlain refused a licence under the rule against biblical characters on stage. It was first performed in Paris on 11 February 1896, while Wilde was in prison, and he never saw it staged.
How and where did Oscar Wilde die?
He died of meningitis at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris on 30 November 1900, aged 46, having been received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. After his release in May 1897 he had lived in France and Italy, partly under the name Sebastian Melmoth. He was first buried at Bagneux and moved to Père Lachaise in 1909.
Which Oscar Wilde books have been filmed?
Many. The Picture of Dorian Gray was filmed in 1945 and as Dorian Gray in 2009; The Importance of Being Earnest by Anthony Asquith in 1952 and Oliver Parker in 2002; An Ideal Husband in 1947 and 1999; and Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ernst Lubitsch in 1925, by Otto Preminger as The Fan in 1949, and as A Good Woman in 2004.
Footnotes
- Oscar Wilde — Wikipedia
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — Wikipedia
- The Importance of Being Earnest — Wikipedia
- De Profundis (letter) — Wikipedia
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol — Wikipedia
- Second act cut short — Magdalen College, Oxford
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
— Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
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