Oscar Wilde's First Tragedy: The Composition, Production, and Reception of Vera; or, The Nihilists

The first book about Oscar Wilde's first play.

At the age of twenty-six Oscar Wilde wrote his first play. A melodramatic tragedy about a plot to assassinate the Russian tsar, Vera; or, The Nihilists is as far as could be imagined from his later hits, Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. A London matinee was cancelled, ostensibly for political reasons, and the final curtain fell on the New York production after only a week, the critics branding the script 'long-drawn dramatic rot'.

Wilde tried to forget his first tragedy, and the disastrous premiere that he described as 'the sharpest agony' of his life.

Vera has often been dismissed as a work of juvenilia; its premiere, relegated to a biographical footnote. But only by closely examining the composition, production, and reception of Vera can the Wilde we know today - the confident, witty, master dramatist - be fully understood. Rob Marland draws on six years of original research, which has uncovered material never before seen, to tell the complete and fascinating story of Oscar Wilde's first, worst, and perhaps most important play.

Rob Marland is the editor of Vera; or; The Nihilists: A Critical Edition of Oscar Wilde's First Play (2026) and of Oscar Wilde: The Complete Interviews (2022), and the author of Oscar Wilde: The Season of Sorrow (2018), a graphic biography that tells the story of Wilde's imprisonment. He is a member of the editorial board of The Wildean, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.