“Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long some day to feel…. Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so.” Thus wrote Oscar Wilde to a young male friend in 1886. As epigraph, in its complete form, this neatly encompasses the major themes of Melissa Knox's ambitious study, which uses largely psychoanalytic insights to illuminate the profound and self-destructive contradictions in Wilde's life and work.