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Robert Sherard Robert Harborough Sherard Kennedy was born in London on 3 December 1861, the fourth child of the Reverend Bennet Sherard Calcraft Kennedy. His father was the illegitimate son of the sixth and last Earl of Harborough and his mother, Jane Stanley Wordsworth, was the grand-daughter of the poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Robert was educated at Queen Elizabeth College, Guernsey, at New College, Oxford, and at the University of Bonn, but he left both Oxford and Bonn without securing a degree. In 1880, having quarrelled with his father and lost his expected inheritance, he abandoned his ‘Kennedy’ surname. In the early 1880s, Robert Sherard settled in Paris and set about earning his living as an author and journalist. He cultivated the acquaintance of a number of the leading literary figures of the day, including Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Alphone Daudet and Oscar Wilde. He published thirty-three books during his lifetime, including a collection of poetry, Whispers (1884), novels, biographies, social studies (notably The White Slaves of England, 1897), and five books inspired by his friendship with Oscar Wilde: Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, 1902; The Life of Oscar Wilde, 1906; The Real Oscar Wilde, 1912; Oscar Wilde Twice Defended, 1934; and Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde, 1936. He was three times married and lived much of his life in France, where he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He died in England, in Ealing, on 30 January 1943. In 1960, in Oscar Wilde and His World, Vyvyan Holland, Wilde’s younger son, gave this assessment of Robert Sherard: ‘When they first met …they felt they had nothing in common and disliked each other intently; but they gradually got together and became life-long friends. Sherard wrote the first three biographical studies of Wilde after his death… On these three books are based all the other biographies of Wilde, except the so-called biography by Frank Harris, which is nothing else but the glorification of Frank Harris. Sherard got a great deal of his material from Lady Wilde when she was a very old lady and was inclined to let her imagination run away with her, particularly where the family history was concerned; and Sherard, a born journalist, was much more attracted by the interest of a story than by its accuracy, a failing which we can see running through all his books. But where his actual contact with Wilde is concerned, he is quite reliable.’ |
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