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Title: Less than Wilde -- an incomplete text
Review: However pretty this edition of Wilde's long letter to Bosie from prison may be, it is unfortunately a truncated half-text (popular in the first half of the 20th century no doubt because of legal and literary sensitivities towards Bosie [who survived Wilde by more than 40 years] and the Douglas family); but, that past, I assure you, the full text is the necessary read -- and may be found in a pricier Penguin edition. This is not a letter for a collector of epigrams and opens not with the abridged "Suffering is one long moment" paragraph but rather with the far more poignant appeal of a man wounded by and starved for the company and the society he in large part created -- "After long and fruitless waiting" -- and he wants to hear from Bosie (and never will).I have read this letter a dozen times -- each reading leaves me, like Coleridge's Mariner, a wiser and a sadder man the following morn.
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