The Coward Does it with a Kiss by Rohase Piercy

We discover her own literary output and attempts to ‘find her wings’ – and yet, Piercy also reveals her voicelessness, the field of her endeavours fenced by the social constraints of class and gender.Īnd I am happy to say that Constance’s tone is not without a truthful spice of waspishness, quite consistent with her situation. We learn how significant female friends inspired her to involve herself in politics and the era-defining struggles of the late Victorians: women’s suffrage, ‘rational dress’, workers’ rights, compassionate orphanages. Refreshingly, Constance is not merely a victim here. How much did she know, how much did she hide, how much did she pretend? Piercy has her dissect all of this, ruminating, analysing, repeatedly coming at the same truths from different and unexpected angles. This for me is where the novel excels: Constance’s unrelenting latter-day honesty burning through the people-pleasing sham of her younger self. Clear-eyed now in illness and disillusion, she faces up to what she really knew and never admitted, even in her secret journal. From two angles, the hopeless present peering at the deluded past, she revisits the creeping estrangement within their marriage, the struggles to fulfil her own talents and the impending doom heralded by the increasingly-demanding presence of Lord Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’).Īs this older, rueful Constance comments in her letter upon the hopeful girl she once was, she begins to piece together some of the multiple narratives she told herself. We meet her trying to make sense of the sorry aftermath.

The crash of his ivory tower inundated the little family and forced Constance to fly the country, changing her own and her children’s names. The diary takes us through these dazzling events, her experience of motherhood (and Oscar’s attitude thereto) and right through the downfall and disgrace of the celebrated playwright. Both of them are now exiled from Britain and suffering the devastating consequences of his criminal conviction and two-year imprisonment.Ĭonfined to her room, she re-reads and comments upon the diary she kept throughout the whirlwind years of early marriage when she became the ‘High Priestess of House Beautiful’, riding high on the crest of social approbation. Well, this is a Constance only months from death, writing a long, never-sent letter to her disgraced husband. So, what was it like to be Mrs Oscar Wilde?

This re-polished gem gives us a moving and insightful picture of just what it might have been like to be Mrs Oscar Wilde. Now Piercy has revised, judiciously fleshed out with newly-discovered material, and generally spruced up the original for a new edition. Rohase Piercy’s epistolatory novel The Coward Does It With A Kiss: The Fictional Reminiscences of Constance Wilde, first published in 1990, may have been one of the first works to pay attention to the mind and heart of Constance Wilde.

The Coward Does it with a Kiss by Rohase Piercy