Mary jane wilde trial#

Mary jane wilde trial#

For example, his 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' has been compared to her poem 'The Brothers' (based on a true story of a trial and execution in the 1798 Rebellion). Her poems are said to have influenced her son Oscar's own work. She wrote several books including 'Ancient legends, mystic charms, and superstitions of Ireland' (1887). She lived with her older son in poverty, supplementing their meagre income by writing for fashionable magazines and producing books based on the research of her late husband into Irish folklore.

Jane Wilde - now Lady Wilde, following the knighting of her husband in 1864 - joined her sons, Willie and Oscar, in London in 1879, where she was making a name for himself in literary circles. When her husband died in 1876, the family discovered that he was virtually bankrupt.

Jane was the grandmother of Oscar's sons Cyril and Vyvyan Holland, and of Willie's daughter Dorothy Wilde. Her eldest son William Wilde became a journalist and poet, her younger son Oscar Wilde became a prolific and famous writer, and her daughter Isola Wilde died in childhood of a fever. Peter's church in Dublin, and they had three children: William Charles Kingsbury Wilde (26 September 1852 – 13 March 1899), Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900), and Isola Francesca Emily Wilde (2 April 1857 – 23 February 1867). On 12 November 1851 she married Sir William Wilde, an eye and ear surgeon (and also a researcher of folklore), in St. She claimed that her great-grandfather was an Italian who had come to Wexford in the 18th century in fact, the Elgees descended from Durham labourers. Even so, she is said to have mastered 10 languages by the age of 18. Her father died when she was three years old which meant she was largely self-educated. Jane was the last of the four children of Charles Elgee (1783–1824), the son of Archdeacon John Elgee, a Wexford solicitor, and his wife Sarah (née Kingsbury, d.