Where to Start With Oscar Wilde

Which Oscar Wilde do you want first — the funniest playwright in the English language, or the author of its most unnerving portrait? Happily, the catalogue is small enough to hold in one hand: exactly one novel, four society comedies, two volumes of fairy tales, and the prison writings. You can cover the essentials inside a week.

His reputation for wit precedes everything — the customs-desk line about having nothing to declare except his genius is probably apocryphal, which tells you something about the gravitational pull of the persona. The page-for-page best of him, though, sits in three places.

Start with The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest opened at London's St James's Theatre on 14 February 1895 and is still the fastest ninety minutes in English drama. Jack Worthing has invented a disreputable brother called Ernest so he can escape to town; Algernon has invented an invalid friend called Bunbury so he can escape to the country; both then court women who declare they could only love a man named Ernest. Wilde drafted it in a few weeks at the seaside town of Worthing in the summer of 1894, then named his hero after the town. Lady Bracknell's interrogation — 'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness' — is the audition piece. Read it aloud if you possibly can.

Then the only novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890, scandalized reviewers, and grew a preface and six additional chapters for the 1891 book edition. Basil Hallward paints a portrait of a beautiful young man; Lord Henry Wotton talks that young man into worshipping his own youth; the portrait quietly takes over the bookkeeping. The preface — 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' — was Wilde answering his critics before they'd finished writing.

The fairy tales nobody warns you about

The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) is where Wilde keeps his sincerity. In the title story, a swallow already late for Egypt strips a gilded statue of its ruby, its two sapphire eyes, and its gold leaf, flying each piece to the city's poor; in 'The Selfish Giant,' a walled garden stays frozen in winter until the children creep back through a gap; in 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' a bird spends one night building a red rose out of song so a student can go to a dance. Ten minutes apiece, and they cut deeper than the comedies.

Where to start with Oscar Wilde: a one-week plan

• Monday: The Importance of Being Earnest — ninety minutes, ideally read aloud with someone else doing Lady Bracknell.
• Midweek: The Picture of Dorian Gray — the 1891 text, preface included.
• Weekend: two fairy tales, then The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), published under the cell number C.3.3. that had been Wilde's address during two years' hard labour.

If the ballad lands, finish with De Profundis, the long letter he wrote from his cell in early 1897; the complete text wasn't published until 1962. Wilde produced the four comedies in roughly four years and lost everything in the three months of trials of 1895 — read him in this order and both halves of that career stay in view. Begin with Lady Bracknell; end with C.3.3.