User:Del!9/Dorothy Wilde

This is the sandbox page where you will draft your initial Wikipedia contribution. If you're starting a new article, you can develop it here until it's ready to go live. If you're working on improvements to an existing article, copy only one section at a time of the article to this sandbox to work on, and be sure to use an edit summary linking to the article you copied from. Do not copy over the entire article. You can find additional instructions here. Remember to save your work regularly using the "Publish page" button. (It just means 'save'; it will still be in the sandbox.) You can add bold formatting to your additions to differentiate them from existing content. Bibliography sandbox

Article Draft

Lead

Article body

Edit summary: I have copied the below information from the Dorothy Wilde Wikipedia article.

Life

Early life

Born on July 11, 1895 in London, three months after her uncle Oscar Wilde's arrest for homosexual acts, Dorothy Wilde was the only child of Oscar's older brother, Willie, and his second wife, Sophie Lily Lees. Though Wilde had never met her uncle, she idolized him. She said she was "more Oscar-like than he was like himself."^[1]

Her father, who was violently alcoholic, died just a few years after her birth.^[2] This left her under the care of her mother and stepfather, translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, though at the time, her mother was “so impoverished that she could not afford to keep her at home” and sent young Wilde away to what she described as a “country convent.” Wilde spoke little of her childhood, with only one story ever told. As recorded by Parisian raconteuse Bettina Bergery, “when Dolly was very young, she used to like to take lumps of sugar, dip them in her pretty mother Lily's perfume, and eat them.”^[3]

World War I

In 1914, she travelled to France in order to drive an ambulance in

Wilde drank to excess and was addicted to heroin. She went through several detoxification attempts, none successful; she emerged from one nursing-home stay with a new dependency on the sleeping pill paraldehyde, then available over-the-counter.^[6]

In 1939 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and refused surgery, seeking alternative treatments.^[7] The following year, with the Germans approaching Paris, she fled to England.^[8] She died aged 45 in 1941, of "causes unascertainable", according to the coroner's inquest—possibly the cancer or possibly a drug overdose.^[9]

References