Constance Lloyd

Constance Lloyd married Oscar Wilde, wrote and campaigned in her own right, and died in exile at forty under a name she had chosen to protect her sons. She was the daughter of an Irish barrister, well read, financially independent through a family trust, and married Wilde in 1884 after a courtship he conducted in public. She was active in the Rational Dress Society, which argued against corsets and heavy skirts on health grounds, edited its gazette, spoke on platforms, and published two books of children's stories; she moved in Theosophical and progressive circles and was not the decorative wife the Wilde legend usually supplies. The marriage produced Cyril and Vyvyan and then unravelled. When Wilde was arrested she was advised to divorce and refused, but took the boys abroad, changed the family name to Holland after an ancestral line, and negotiated an allowance for him on condition he not see Douglas. She visited him in prison to tell him his mother had died. A fall down stairs left her with spinal injuries, and she died after surgery in Genoa in 1898. Her two books for children, There Was Once and A Long Time Ago, are retellings of fairy tales and were published under her own name. She wrote to Wilde in prison and the allowance she arranged was the only settled income he had afterwards. Her sons were not told what had happened to their father for years; Vyvyan Holland wrote Son of Oscar Wilde in 1954 and recovered the name. Her grave at Staglieno in Genoa was neglected for decades and the words wife of Oscar Wilde were added to the stone only in 1963.

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