Eight-year-old Merlin Holland was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue in London with his father one day in the summer of 1954 when he noticed the name Oscar Wilde on a theater billboard. “Oh, Daddy, isn’t Oscar Wilde something to do with our family?” he once recalled asking his father, Vyvyan Holland. It was a question the elder Holland had been dreading. “Oh, God, I’m now going to have to face up to this,” he wrote in his diary soon after. Indeed, few people were then aware that Vyvyan was a son of the literary legend.

That year, as British society was commemorating the centennial of Oscar Wilde’s birth, the opprobrium heaped upon him after his conviction and imprisonment for “gross indecency” in 1895 was hardly a distant memory for Wilde’s descendants. For them, the trauma stemming from

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