A 'born writer' who never completed the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination, Dolly Wilde made her career in the salons - and in the bedrooms - of some of London and Paris's most interesting women and men. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, Dolly drenched her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunites in flamboyant affairs, and created continuous sensation by the ways in which she seemed to be reliving the life of her infamous uncle.In this revolutionary and very modern biography, Joan Schenkar provides a fascinating look at what it means to live with the talents but not the achievements of biography's usual subjects: those obliterating 'winners' - like Dolly's uncle Oscar - whose stories have almost erased riveting histories like Dolly's own. And she uncovers never-before-published evidence of the hidden life of the Wilde family and of the extraordinary salon society of Natalie Clifford Barney, Dolly Wilde's longest and most fatal attachment.
