Merlin Holland

Christopher Merlin Vyvyan Holland (born 1945 in London) is a biographer, editor, and the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde.

Holland is the son of the author Vyvyan Holland and his second wife, Thelma Besant, and is the only grandchild of Oscar Wilde. Although a direct male-line descendant of Oscar Wilde, his last name differs because Wilde's wife Constance changed the children's surname to Holland (an old family name on her side) after Wilde's trial for gross indecency and subsequent imprisonment.

For the last 30 years Holland has studied and researched Wilde's life. He is the co-editor, with Rupert Hart-Davis, of The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, and the editor of Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess, the first uncensored version of his grandfather's 1895 trials, (also titled The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde for release in the US). Holland has criticized Richard Ellmann's 1987 biography, Oscar Wilde, as inaccurate, particularly the claim of syphilis. According to The Guardian, Holland has also "unearthed medical evidence within private family letters, which has enabled a doctor to determine the likely cause of Constance’s demise. The letters reveal symptoms nowadays associated with multiple sclerosis but apparently wrongly diagnosed by her two doctors. One [an unnamed German 'nerve doctor'] resorted to dubious remedies and the other [Luigi Maria Bossi] conducted a botched operation that days later claimed her life."

Holland has also written The Wilde Album, a small volume that included hitherto unpublished photographs of Wilde. The book focuses on how the scandal caused by Wilde's trials affected his family, most notably his wife, Constance, and their children, Cyril and Vyvyan. In 2006, his book Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters was published, and his volume Coffee with Oscar Wilde, an imagined conversation with Oscar, was released in the autumn of 2007. Holland also wrote A Portrait of Oscar Wilde (2008), which reveals Wilde through manuscripts and letters from the Lucia Moreira Salles collection, located at the The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.

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