Merlin Holland
(PRINCETON, NJ) -- Princeton University's Fund for Irish Studies continues its 2025-26 series with a talk by Merlin Holland, the only grandson of famed writer Oscar Wilde, about his legendary grandfather on Friday, April 10, 2026 at 4:30pm in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street in Princeton. Holland will draw from his extensive research, family history, and newly published book, After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal.
The event is free and open to the public; tickets are required and are available to reserve in advance through University Ticketing.
A biographer and editor, Holland lives in France. For the last forty years he has been researching his grandfather's life and works and writes, lectures and broadcasts regularly on the subject. His publications include Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess, the first complete, verbatim record of the libel trial which ultimately brought Oscar Wilde to ruin and social disgrace, and The Wilde Album, a pictorial biography of Oscar Wilde which has now been translated into seven European languages. He is also the co-editor of The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde as well as the editor of an abridged and commentated version of Oscar's letters, Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters and author of Conversations with Oscar Wilde, a series of imaginary conversations between Holland and his grandfather.
Holland's new book, After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal, shows how Wilde "has caused even more trouble dead than alive." The book traces the extraordinary fluctuations in his reputation, the history of his surviving family, and the quarrels between his friends and enemies for decades after his death. After Wilde's criminal conviction in 1895, his wife, Constance, and their two sons were forced to move abroad and change their name to Holland. The family has never reverted to the name Wilde.
In reviewing his latest book, Kirkus Reviews noted that, "Holland's tireless investigation debunks myths and lies, and reveals hypocrisy and homophobia among the British upper classes."
The book was published in the U.K last year to strong reviews and will be launched in the U.S. on April 7, after which the author will begin a book tour across the country.
Holland will be available to sign his book after the talk, copies of which will be available for purchase.
The 2025-26 Fund for Irish Studies Series is co-chaired by Jane Cox, Director of Princeton's Program in Theater & Music Theater, and Robert Spoo, Princeton's Leonard L. Milberg '53 Professor in Irish Letters.
The Fund for Irish Studies, now in its 28th year, affords all Princeton students, and the community at large, a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, and economics not only of Ireland but of "Ireland in the world." The lecture series is co-produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
The Fund for Irish Studies website lists more information about the series. The final event in this season's series is on Thursday, April 23 at 4:10pm in 50 McCosh Hall. Via Zoom, writer John Banville will present the opening keynote on "Fiction and the Dream" as part of the (De)Stabilizing Nabakov conference presented by Princeton's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and cosponsored by the Fund for Irish Studies.
The Fund for Irish Studies is generously sponsored by the Durkin Family Trust and the James J. Kerrigan Jr. '45 and Margaret M. Kerrigan Fund for Irish Studies.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
