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Hello. In episode 84 of the podcast we looked at the trials of Oscar Wilde.

That story had three main characters. Today's story has four. In the first story the three prime

movers were the playwright and Bon Vivant Oscar Wilde is Paramore Lord

Alfred Douglas also known as Boz, and Bozy's father, the Marcus of

Queensberry.

The story was full of triumph and tragedy, just as Oscar Wilde conquered the literary world with his most famous and greatest plays,

he stumbled into a trial against Boze's father, which ended in Wilde's imprisonment.

While in prison, Wild wrote a document called De Profundus, literally meaning from the depths.

De Profundus is a letter to Bozie that covers everything from bitter

recriminations to sharp and often biting criticism of Bozie as an artist and

life partner to a defense of Wild's actions, to a tender acknowledgement of the feelings that Wild had inescapably

felt and still felt toward the younger man. Boie didn't receive the letter directly.

Instead, Wilde entrusted it to his literary executor, a man named Robert Ross.

He's our third character today. Ross was himself a former lover of Wild's.

After Wild's tragically early death, Ross and Bozy eventually fell into a feud about the

manuscript that led to yet another horrible outcome.

Our guest today, Laura Lee, has written a book about their feud called Oscar's Ghost,

the Battle for Oscar Wilde's legacy.

She'll tell us who Robert Ross was,

how the three of them became entangled,

how the manuscript came to dominate Bozie's thinking,

...