I am so gratified by a positive endorsement that I’ve just received of my book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, that I hope that visitors to the Ink Desk will forgive me for the act of self-indulgence implicit in my posting it. I am preserving the scholar’s anonymity because the endorsement was given in private correspondence to me. Here it is:

I’ve just finished your Wilde and – you were quite right to be confident that I would – I enjoyed it tremendously. I had to sprint through a lot of Wilde for my PhD and have been keeping a eye on what’s out there ever since. Hence I’m very aware of the huge amount of  Wildeana that’s shovelled out virtually annually: I simply did not think it was possible for anyone to come up with anything new. And yet you certainly and most spectacularly did: both a new and much needed approach, which really makes the lines of his life and his work much clearer, and – more astounding – new information and primary source-material. That alone is an extraordinary feat of scholarship. Gosh.

I’m also now rather appalled at the unscholarly shenanigans that  Ellman – of whom I was previously an unalloyed admirer – seems to have got away with. His book is, as you generously say, still a terrific repository of facts – but he has missed a lot of the truth. And some of the most important facts are, as you have also very clearly now shown, simply wrong. And wrong in ways than he should have known better than to permit himself. Yet he is still widely seen as The Definitive. Time will solve this, I suppose. I wonder what sort of reviews you got? I hope they fell at your feet.