Wilde then suffered another devastating personal tragedy. His wife, Constance, whom he had married in 1884, left him in the wake of the scandal surrounding his conviction.
The couple had two sons: Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born the following year. According to Irish Central, Constance departed with the boys to Genoa, Italy, where she would die in 1898, aged just 40. Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland (via Irish Central), later stated that she died "by the knife of an irresponsible surgeon."
That knife was wielded by Luigi Maria Bossi, who believed that a gynecological procedure may have been the answer to Constance's long-standing health problems, believed today to have been caused by multiple sclerosis. The procedure was a very dangerous one at the time, Holland stated, and she never recovered from it. Prior to her untimely death, though, Constance and her two sons' life in Europe was agony to Wilde. The stricken playwright, The School Of Life reports, "would never see his children again; he missed them every day."
Wilde was a very emotionally vulnerable man. He spent the first six months of his sentence in Pentonville Prison, London, before being transferred to Reading Gaol. On the journey, he was recognized and relentlessly mocked and derided. In his own words, he languished "in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me, I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time."
