Oscar Wilde: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1854 to 1900
Quick answer: Oscar Wilde craft file: the fairy tale with an adult ending, the paradox as plot, "The Happy Prince", "The Selfish Giant", "The Canterville Ghost", and what to steal.
Quick facts
- Born: 1854, Dublin
- Died: 1900, Paris, aged 46
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "The Happy Prince", "The Selfish Giant", "The Canterville Ghost"
- Signature move: The fairy-tale surface with an ironic frame that judges the judges
- Start with: "The Happy Prince" (1888)
Wilde's short fiction fits into two small books of fairy tales and one of comic stories, all written before his fortieth year, and it is the part of his work that children meet first and adults underrate. The tales are built like Andersen's and end like nobody else's: the good die, the beautiful are thrown in the gutter, and the last word goes to a committee that has understood nothing.
What he actually does on the page
He gives the moral to the wrong people. "The Happy Prince" (1888) is a statue who sends a swallow to strip his gold leaf and jewels for the poor until he is dull and the bird is dead at his feet. The Town Councillors then declare the statue shabby and have it melted down, and the story ends in heaven: "'Bring me the two most precious things in the city,' said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird." The councillors' judgement and God's are placed side by side, and Wilde does not adjudicate.
He lets a sacrifice go unnoticed by its beneficiary. In "The Nightingale and the Rose" (1888) the bird sings all night with a thorn in her heart to make one red rose for a student in love; the girl rejects the rose for a rival's jewels and the student throws it into the gutter and goes back to his metaphysics. The tale is about the artist's gift and the audience's indifference, and the surface never says so.
He turns paradox into plot. "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" (1887) gives a young man a palm-reading that says he will commit murder, and he decides to get it over with before his wedding, as a duty to his fiancee. One inverted premise, carried out with perfect logic.
The signature move
The frame that judges the judges is best dissected in "The Selfish Giant" (1888). The giant walls his garden against the children; winter refuses to leave it; when the children creep back through a hole the spring returns, and the giant knocks down the wall. One small boy he lifted into a tree never comes back. Years later, old and gentle, the giant finds the boy standing under a tree in blossom with wounds in his hands and feet, and the boy tells him he may come to his garden, which is Paradise. The children find the giant dead under the tree, covered in white blossoms. Wilde tells all this in nursery cadence and never names the boy. The reader who recognises him supplies the whole theology; the reader who does not gets a story about a wall. Writing two stories in one text, for two readers, is the skill on show.
Stories to read first
Seven tales and stories, all from 1887 to 1891.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the tales.
What not to copy
The prose can be perfumed to the point of suffocation, especially in A House of Pomegranates, where the sentences pile up jewels and fabrics until the story disappears under them. The Christian iconography of the tales is Wilde's and carries their weight; borrowed without belief or purpose it is decoration. Take the frame and the double reader; write plainer sentences.
Life at a glance
- 1854: Born in Dublin
- 1878: Wins the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford
- 1887: "The Canterville Ghost" and "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" in magazines
- 1888: The Happy Prince and Other Tales
- 1891: A House of Pomegranates and the Lord Arthur Savile's Crime collection; The Picture of Dorian Gray in book form
- 1895: The Importance of Being Earnest opens in February; convicted in May and sentenced to two years' hard labour
- 1898: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- 1900: Dies in a Paris hotel
What writers can take from this
- Let the last word go to someone who has misjudged everything.
- Write sacrifice without a witness.
- Take one inverted premise and honour its logic to the end.
- Aim a children's story at a second, adult reader without signalling.
- Cut the jewellery from the sentences; the structure will carry the beauty.
Try it yourself
Write a fairy tale in under 900 words about someone who gives away everything they have, piece by piece, to people who never learn where it came from. The final paragraph must be spoken by officials assessing what is left, and they must get it entirely wrong. Use sentences a ten-year-old could read aloud.
Questions
What is Oscar Wilde's best short story?
"The Happy Prince" (1888) and "The Selfish Giant" (1888) are the most loved and most reprinted. "The Canterville Ghost" (1887) is his best comic story.
How did Oscar Wilde influence the short story?
He gave the literary fairy tale an adult ironic frame and showed that a children's form could carry serious argument. His inverted-premise comedies feed directly into the plays and into a century of comic fiction.
Is Oscar Wilde hard to read?
The fairy tales are written for reading aloud to children and are among the easiest classic stories in English. The comic stories are longer and lightly dated but clear.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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