Description: A "born writer" who never realized the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination, Dolly Wilde was a brilliant wit, charged with charm and loaded with sexual allure. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, she drowned her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs, and created continuous sensations by the ways in which she seemed to be re-living the life of her infamous uncle.

In this 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. Most moving of all, she restores Dolly Wilde to the company she should be keeping -- the company of her unusual grandmother, her legendary uncle, and the fabulous generation of Modernist women in Paris and London whose achievements bloomed so beautifully in the first half of the twentieth century.

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