Vyvyan Holland

Vyvyan Holland was Oscar Wilde's younger son, was given a new surname at nine, and spent his adult life putting his father's work back into print. He was born in London and had an ordinary comfortable childhood until his father's trial in 1895, after which his mother Constance took the boys abroad and changed the family name to Holland, a name from her own ancestry. He was moved between schools in Switzerland and Germany where nobody knew who he was, was forbidden to speak English, and was not told his father had died; his mother died in 1898 after spinal surgery, and he and his brother Cyril were brought up by relatives who did not mention Wilde. He was educated at Stonyhurst and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and read for the bar. Cyril was killed by a sniper in France in 1915, having, by his own account in a letter, gone to the war partly to prove the family was not what people said. Vyvyan served through the war in the artillery and was awarded the Military Cross. He became a translator and writer, edited his father's letters and collected works, and in 1954 published Son of Oscar Wilde, which broke a silence the family had kept for nearly sixty years and treated his father without either apology or special pleading. He attended the unveiling of a plaque in Tite Street the same year. His own son Merlin Holland continued the work and has published the transcripts of the trials. He was fluent in French and Italian and translated widely, including Julien Green and a study of gastronomy. He married twice. He wrote a second volume of memoirs, Time Remembered, published in 1966, the year before he died.

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