Oscar Wilde

The Canterville Ghost Oscar Wilde

1906 edition, illustrated by Wallace Goldsmith"The Canterville Ghost" is a novella by Oscar Wilde. It has been adapted for the stage and screen several times. This is a story is about an American family who move to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead nobleman, who killed his wife and was starved to death by his wife's brothers. It was the first of Wilde's stories to be published, appearing in 1887. The story did not immediately receive much critical attention, and indeed Wilde was not viewed as an important author until the publication, during the 1890s, of his novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891) and of several well-received plays, including "The Importance of Being Earnest" (1895). In "The Canterville Ghost," Wilde draws upon fairy tales, Gothic novels, and stories of Americans abroad to shape his comic ghost story. One of the major themes in the story is the culture clash between a sixteenth-century English ghost and a late nineteenth-century American family. But the story also examines the disparity between the public self and the private self, a theme to which Wilde would return again in his later writings.