Extensively researched and written (as someone else has noted, perhaps the book started its life as a Ph,D thesis), Gregory Mackie's book delves deep into the world of Oscar Wilde fakes and forgeries that spawned after the demise of Wilde. Mackie's investigation takes the readers into the fascinating world of Wilde literary hoaxes - on how works disguised as Wilde's own started appearing after Wilde's passing. Even as Mackie's subject matter is academic in nature, the book is immensely readable for its engaging prose. Much enjoyed.

This is a fascinating look at Oscar Wilde Frauds and Forgeries. After Wilde's death there was a cast of characters who hoped to cash in on the author's notoriety. I learned a lot reading this book. The author has written a well researched book about Wilde fandom. Enjoy

Although hard to follow and heavy, it was a very enjoyable reading. You would never guess what happened after Oscar Wilde's death, how he afected the literary world with his passing and what peple did in order to preserve his memory or get famous using his name. Gregory Mackie did an incredible job in recollecting al this information and facts.

I’ve always enjoyed Oscar Wilde’s writing and am fascinated by the life, but this book was one step too far for me personally. Not that I don’t appreciate its scope and meticulous research, but I found it just too academic and scholarly – as I think it would be for most general readers. It’s an academic exploration of Wilde’s afterlife, in the form of the many fakes, impostures, forged manuscripts and fan-fiction, a detailed history of the production and circulation of Wilde forgeries. I give full credit to the book for what is has achieved and for what it is, but what it is was not for me. An important contribution to Wilde studies, for sure, but rather too dense a read for me.

The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book. There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this!

A dense and fascinating look at first the way Wilde explored the idea of forgery, authenticity and fan culture and then the way that his own image and works were interpreted through those prisms after his death. Clearly began life as a PhD thesis; a dense, theory-based and well-cited piece of work.

A fascinating book for fans of fanfiction and literary hoaxes. As a fan of both, this was absolutely up my alley. I will be purchasing this when it's out because it needs to be on my shelves.

The general thesis of the work is the difference between literary hoaxes / falsely attributed works and fanfiction. Authorship is often a very fluid and fickle beast, and the extent to which a person who influences the work should be credited as author is by no means universally agreed upon. Added to that the fact that Wilde was, of sorts, a character himself, and there's a beautiful mess to untangle, which Mackie does admirably.

I absolutely recommend this book for those interested in fandom, LGBTQ+ history and questions of authorship.

If you think fanfiction is a young person's game, Beautiful Untrue Things is about to blow your mind. Oscar Wilde was incredibly popular, and after his death a treasure trove of literature accredited to him began to pop up. Only, these were not his writings, but clever forgeries in the vein of fan fiction.

Gregory Mackie does a wonderful job at not only discussing the strange crime, but also the impact Oscar Wilde continued to have on society, even decades after his death.

This is a marvelously detailed, meticulously researched, thoroughly academic study - and not what I was expecting. It reads like a textbook, which is not a bad thing or a good thing, just an observation. It made it much more work to read than I anticipated; I was expecting narrative nonfiction rather than a book-length scholarly article.

I'm a fan of Wilde's fiction. I know an above-average amount about his life, but by no means am I an afficionado. As a result, this was a tough read for me and I struggled with it. That isn't to say that there is anything to criticize about the book so much as it is to say that I was really not the right audience for it. I'm giving it 4 stars, not because I enjoyed it that much personally, but because I think it deserves credit for what it accomplished - namely, providing a novel look at the aftereffects of Fame and literary following on the reputation and body of work of a man who was a literary genius and ahead of his time...

This is an unapologetically dense, academic, thoroughly-nerdy book that I powered through and ended up really enjoying. Rather than adding another biography of Oscar Wilde to the pile, Gregory Mackie analyzes the pile itself. In particular, asking the who/what/when/where/why/how of why so many forgeries and false stories had been woven into the mythology of Oscar Wilde by writers during the 1920's and 1930's.

Mackie's treatment of the subject matter will be especially relevant to those authors who are interested in the subjects of fandom. In the beginning of this book Mackie proposes that some of the outright forgery should be viewed like fan-fiction. For a person like Oscar Wilde, who treated himself like a character in many respects, the concept of adding to the myth was something that he himself encouraged.

I think this book adds something new and something of value to the scholarship of Oscar Wilde and, subsequently, to the fields of literary scholarship, history, and sociology. I am glad to have read it.

I'm a huge fan of Oscar Wild and found this book enthralling and engrossing.
I loved how well researched and well written this book is.
It was a great read and I'm happy a learnt a lot.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

A bonkers Borgesian feast of a book, looking at the plays made for Oscar Wilde's legacy by various interested parties, from his official executors to fakes, forgers and performance fraudsters. We open with the 'real' portrait of Mr WH, or at any rate a sketch made long after the original was lost – which is to say, an authentic piece of Wildean ephemera that is also a reproduction of a reproduction of a fictional painting that was itself a forgery. This is, in short, a book which heads through the looking-glass, finds another looking-glass, and then keeps on going. And that story of Shakespeare's rumoured boy lover is itself reflected in the first chapter proper, which explores the authorised custodians of the legacy, Ross, Ledger and Millard – a queer triumvirate reflecting the leads in Wilde's tale, but ones far more concerned with establishing facts of the matter. Never entirely disinterested facts, it's true; Ross in particular was concerned to create a Wilde fit for canonical company, to redeem the memory and expunge the disgrace. Sometimes this was entirely fair, as in stamping on the unauthorised publication of the scandalous (and not very good) The Priest And The Acolyte in editions ascribed to Wilde. Other times, as with the abbreviation of De Profundis, it was a more interventionist sculpting. All of it, though, somehow un-Wildean in its insistence on a single, official version: "It was to be one of the great ironies of Wilde's afterlife that his partisans worked to protect a writer devoted to the creation of beautiful untrue things by constructing an archival bastion of facts." There is a particularly painful irony to the excerpts of Ledger and Millard discussing publication details of various Wildean texts, but never the contents, much less the themes – a proof, perhaps, that whatever the topic, whether it be angels dancing on the head of a pin or cuts of Star Wars films, some geeks were ever thus. Though I do think Mackie maybe misreads British humour a little regarding the piss-take-y Ross introduction to the bibliography by Millard (which, granted, does sound like a green ink project if ever I saw one) - "I want to assure those, such as myself, who are entirely ignorant of enthusiasm for fourteenth editions or of the aesthetic excitement over a misprint of twenty years ago, that there is an enormous amount of diverting reading under these heavy-looking headings and that Mr Stuart Mason's book is not nearly so dull as it looks."

And this notion of Wilde's enthusiasts as a prototypical fandom is a recurring note: he seeks to pull the dawn of fanfic back from Star Trek to these endeavours to inhabit the experience of writing as Wilde. Which I don't disagree with, though I'd argue he hasn't been nearly bold enough; Milton, Dante and Virgil all perpetrated serious (and mostly dire) fanfic, with Milton in particular prone to clunky scenes of exposition asserting his own headcanon. Seriously, that scene in Eden with the archangel turning to camera and answering a tedious theological question in Milton's favour – you might find clunkier somewhere in the depths of AO3, but you'd have to dig hard.

The most intriguing example of this is the enigmatic Dorian Hope, who kept trying to sell Wilde letters and manuscripts which weren't. Mackie suggests that, while the money was obviously some attraction, the real interest was in the Pierre Menard-like experience of writing as Wilde, and there's something beautiful in the way he would often trip himself up by attempting an excess of authenticatory details, some of which would inevitably be wrong. Still, it was carried off with enough flair to fool even the punctilious Millard for a time. Mackie has a theory as to the real identity behind what's painfully obvious as a pseudonym, but offers it almost in passing; he's not like one of those painfully over-literal Ripperologists who still thinks that solving the mystery in 2019 will change a damn thing. But this does introduce us in passing to another candidate, who as Mackie points out would have had to fake his own death to be the culprit, which would be particularly interesting given he had himself earlier claimed that Wilde's own death was faked. Again: mirrors within mirrors. Also, this time, literal pirates to go with the literary ones (a motif which recurs when a later faker is seldom seen without a parrot on her shoulder). But in keeping with the fandom comparison, there's also the notion that maybe there wasn't just one Dorian Hope, that this was a "forgers' atelier". Which apart from anything else might explain why one manuscript should have been forged twice – though perhaps it's simply down to how perfect it was for the game, and this was crime for crime's sake, like the Sphinx without a Secret herself, Wilde's Lady Alroy, and her intricate masque of being up to something.

Along the way, other details crop up, for instance that some of The Importance of Being Earnest's most famous lines date from revisions after prison, meaning they weren't in the original performances – as startling a rewrite of one's mental scenery as the time I first learned that the Charleston couldn't possibly have been danced at Gatsby's parties. And squatting in the background throughout, occasionally popping up to huff and puff, the increasingly ghastly Bosie. If Ross et al were life imitating art from The Portrait of Mr WH, Bosie seemed determined to be the ugliness of Dorian Grey's portrait coming through in real time, ultimately even coming out in support of Hitler. I read a biography of him once, many years ago, but I think I've forgotten most of the detail for my own protection. Though somewhere along the way he did at least call Ross "the high priest of all the sodomites in London", which of course remains a coveted position to this day.

And having earlier glanced at the claims Wilde wasn't really dead, we come back to it with the period in which mediums claimed to be channelling his spirit, working up from odd remarks and conversations to an entire play, put out under the irresistible title Is It A Forgery?. I say 'irresistible', but theatres resisted it quite successfully, thank you very much, and it was never performed – a state of affairs I'd love to see rectified, for all that it sounds like an ungainly Wilde megamix bolted on to a spiritualist final act. That Wilde should have been "a somewhat shady shade" comes as little surprise; more remarkable is that, even when rival mediums claimed to have contact with him, at least one of the alleged posthumous Wildes was quite prepared to accept the other's claim to be him too. Which...isn't that just the most Wildean response to an impostor, even if it is itself coming from an impostor? This chapter also takes in the questions of authenticity and intellectual property law which arise from literal ghostwriting, or what's purported to be such. And it compares the mediumistic productions with those such as Echo de Paris by Laurence Housman, an openly fictional resurrection of Wilde. Although sadly, and perhaps for reasons of space, Mackie doesn't pursue the various heirs of Housman down the years, the resurrections at which everyone from Peter Ackroyd and Tom Stoppard to Gyles Brandreth has tried their hand.

And finally (aside from the conclusion – which itself introduces one late twist I can't bear to spoil here) we have the remarkable figure of Mrs Chan-Toon, who forged not just Wilde, but Dunsany and George Bernard Shaw too. She'd send the forgeries to Shaw, and he'd write back annotating with outrage – but thus increase the value of what was now, in a sense, genuine Shaw. So if this is a story of fandom, she's perhaps the canny wind-up merchant who realises that even people buying a ticket to a film version they hate are still buying a ticket. Much like Dorian Hope undoing his credibility with an excess of authenticating detail, her alleged Wilde play, For Love Of The King, was obviously not by Wilde because it depicted Burma far too accurately – and she knew Burma, whereas Wilde was more into a generalised decoraive orientalism. Not to mention the fact that she'd already used the title before in a story she admitted as her own work. And yet, Methuen, Wilde's publisher, accepted it – albeit with a private note from EV Lucas that it was "awful tosh" – because unlike Ross, they would rather risk a forgery creeping in to the official Collected Works than incompleteness. And in a sense, the fact it wasn't very good even supported her story – after all, another Wilde classic would probably have been published sooner, but one could believe that this offcut might have languished for a time.

And of course what have I done here? I've stacked facts and observations and what-not into a teetering stack, when really I should have summed up the whole business with an aphorism or two. We never learn. But for any fan of Wilde, or of the literary world playing silly buggers, or of prodding at the mirage of authenticity, this is a fabulous read. Not to mention a wonderful new angle on "a theorist – and something of a practitioner – of literary imposture" who himself became the subject or object of same, and would probably have been rather happy about that.

I desperately want to read this but it won’t download at all...! I have no choice but to rate it 1 just because I haven’t touched it. I’m so sorry :(