Merlin Holland

British writer

Christopher Merlin Vyvyan Holland (born December 1945) is a British biographer and editor. He is the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde, whose life he has researched and written about extensively.

Born in London in December 1945, Christopher Merlin Vyvyan Holland is the son of the author Vyvyan Holland and his second wife, Thelma Besant. He is the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde and Constance Lloyd. His mother Thelma was an Australian cosmetician who became the personal beauty adviser to Queen Elizabeth II for about 10 years from the mid 1940s. His paternal grandmother, Constance, had changed her and her children's surname to Holland (an old family name) in 1895, after Wilde had been convicted of homosexual acts and imprisoned, in order to gain some privacy for the boys and distance from the scandal.

Holland has studied and researched Wilde's life for more than thirty years. He is the editor of Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess, the first uncensored version of his grandfather's 1895 trials. (The book is titled The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde for release in the US.) Holland has criticised Richard Ellmann's 1987 biography, Oscar Wilde, as inaccurate, particularly his claim that Wilde had syphilis and transmitted it to Constance. According to The Guardian, Holland has "unearthed medical evidence within private family letters, which has enabled a doctor to determine the likely cause of Constance's death. The letters reveal symptoms nowadays associated with multiple sclerosis but apparently wrongly diagnosed by her two doctors. One, an unnamed German 'nerve doctor', resorted to dubious remedies and the other, Luigi Maria Bossi, conducted a botched operation that days later claimed her life." Holland has also written The Wilde Album, a small volume that included hitherto unpublished photographs of Wilde. The book focuses on how the scandal caused by Wilde's trials affected his family, most notably his wife, Constance, and their children, Cyril and Vyvyan. In 2006, his book Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters was published, and his volume Coffee with Oscar Wilde, an imagined conversation with Wilde, was released in the autumn of 2007. Holland's play The Trials of Oscar Wilde, co authored with John O'Connor and re enacting the 1895 trials of Lord Queensberry for libel and Oscar Wilde for gross indecency, toured the United Kingdom in 2014 in a production by the European Arts Company.

Holland, Vyvyan (Merlin Holland, Ed. ), Son of Oscar Wilde. London: Carroll & Graf, 1999. 2nd Edition. Nick Stafford (writer), David Hunter (director), The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, based on Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess and broadcast for the first time on BBC Radio 4 as a Saturday Drama on 28 June 2014.