Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 37

25 August [1880] 1 Tite Street, Chelsea, London

Dear Mrs Hunt, It was so good of you to take the trouble of sending me such a long account of your little village. I have been hoping to go every week, but have had so many engagements that it has been out of my power; which, believe me, is no small disappointment. I should like so much to be with you all.

And now I am trying to settle a new house, where Mr Miles and I are going to live. The address is horrid but the house very pretty. It is much nearer you than my old house, so I hope we shall often, if you let me, have ‘dishes of tea’ at one another’s houses.

I have broken a promise shamefully to Miss Violet about a poem I promised to send her. My only excuse is that nowadays the selection of colours and furniture has quite taken the place of the cases of conscience of the middle ages, and usually involves quite as much remorse. However I send her one I have just published. I hope she will see some beauty in it, and that your wonderful husband’s wonderful radicalism will be appeased by my first attempt at political prophecy, which occurs in the last verse. If she will send me a little line to say what she thinks of it, it will give me such pleasure.

I hope she has been writing herself. After all, the Muses are as often to be met with in our English fields as they ever were by Castaly, or Helicon, though I have always in my heart thought that the simultaneous appearance of nine (unmarried) sisters at a time must have been a little embarrassing.

Please remember me most kindly to your husband, and all yours, and believe me very truly yours

OSCAR WILDE

Wilde by this time had spent the best part of a year and a half in London making himself seen and talked about, regularly caricatured by du Maurier in Punch. He now needed to show that he was capable of more than a few sonnets to actresses and accordingly wrote and published privately his first play, Vera; or, the Nihilists, a drama set in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. He sent copies to leading theatrical figures, among them two Americans, Clara Morris and Hermann Vezin (who later gave him voice coaching before his lecture tour of America), but received no offer to produce it.