Today (11 July 2020) marks the 125th birthday of Oscar Wilde’s niece, Dorothy “Dolly” Ierne Wilde.
Dolly was the only daughter of Oscar’s brother, Willy, and Willy’s second wife, Lily. With her strong chin and dreamy eyes she bore more than a passing resemblance to her famous uncle. She was once photographed wearing a fur collared coat and flowing silk tie, with her shoulder-length dark hair swept back, à la Oscar in his aesthetic phase.
Oscar and his niece Dolly in the aesthetic garb of the early 1880s.
Nicknamed Oscaria by her friends, she lit up many a soiree during the années folles of the 1920s, as had her uncle thirty years earlier. Oscar once told a friend that he had put his genius into his life, but only his talent into his works. Dolly, perhaps recognising that, like Oscar, her talents were better suited to socialising than literary endeavours, wrote little, although her caustic humour shines through in her letters.
She told only one story of her childhood: that she liked to dip sugar cubes in her mother’s perfume and then eat them. In the Great War she drove ambulances in France.
Dolly Wilde’s grave. Click to enlarge. Left: viewed from the path (Dolly's gravestone is marked with a yellow cross) Right: a closer view.
Dolly was a lesbian, and part of the Sapphic circle that orbited around Natalie Clifford-Barney, an American writer whose Parisian literary salon ran for many decades in the first half of the 20th century. Dolly’s friend Pamela “Honey” Harris would remember that Dolly “Hardly ever talked about herself except to say how profoundly melancholy she was and how everyone was in love with her.”
Like her father and uncle, Dolly had an addictive personality. Willie and Oscar both drank to excess, and Oscar had a penchant for hashish and opium-tainted cigarettes; Dolly, too, was a heavy drinker, and dependent on heroin and sleeping pills. Her father and uncle had both died aged 46; Dolly succumbed either to breast cancer or possibly a drug overdose in 1941, at the age of 45.
A close up of Dolly’s grave. Click to enlarge. The engraving reads “To the memory of | SOPHIA TEIXEIRA de MATTOS | DIED 7th OCTOBER | 1922 | AND OF HER DAUGHTER | DOROTHY IERNE | WILDE | DIED 10th APRIL 1941”
After her death, Clifford-Barney and Harris co-edited a memorial volume to Dolly, which they titled Oscaria. Harris, who had cared for Dolly in her last illness, also took it upon herself to design Dolly’s gravestone, selecting the stone, lettering, and text.
Last year I visited Kensal Green Cemetery, where Dolly is buried. Her grave is marked on this map (as is that of her paternal grandmother, Jane, Lady Wilde), but I had to search for it for some time because the stone is quite weathered and her name is difficult to make out. If you would like to pay your respects, these pictures—along with the map—should guide you to her final resting place.
I highly recommend Truly Wilde, Joan Schenkar’s biography of Dolly.
You can also read about my visits to the graves of others in Wilde’s circle: Sir William Wilde (Oscar’s father), Jane, Lady Wilde (Oscar’s mother), Constance Wilde (Oscar’s wife).
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