A Forgotten Woman:
Mrs Oscar Wilde

Written and performed by Lexi Wolfe

History remembers Oscar Wilde. But what happened to the woman who loved him, married him and paid an extraordinary price for his downfall?

Written and performed by Lexi Wolfe, A Forgotten Woman: Mrs Oscar Wilde brings Constance Lloyd out of her famous husband’s shadow and restores a remarkable woman to the centre of her own story.

Writer, feminist, mother and campaigner, Constance possessed a sharp intelligence and a dry wit to rival Oscar’s. Drawing upon her surviving letters, this intimate solo performance follows her from a difficult childhood and glittering entry into Victorian society through marriage, motherhood and ultimately the scandal that would tear her family apart.

Funny, poignant and deeply moving, it is the story of a woman history reduced to a footnote – finally allowed to speak for herself.

More than Mrs Oscar Wilde

Long before scandal engulfed the Wilde family, Constance Lloyd was establishing an identity of her own.

She wrote and published children’s stories and articles, embraced the aesthetic movement and became involved in progressive causes including dress reform and women’s rights. Her marriage to Oscar began with genuine love and intellectual companionship, and together they created a fashionable London home and raised two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.

Yet history would come to remember Constance primarily through the man she married.

A Forgotten Woman sets out to change that – revealing an intelligent, witty and independent woman whose own achievements deserve recognition.

Love, scandal and exile

In 1895, Oscar Wilde’s prosecution and imprisonment changed everything.

Constance found herself caught in the wreckage of a scandal not of her making. She left Britain with her children and eventually adopted the surname Holland in an attempt to shield her sons from the notoriety attached to the Wilde name.

Yet the production is not simply a retelling of Oscar’s downfall from his wife’s perspective. Through Constance’s correspondence – including intimate letters to her beloved brother Otho – Lexi Wolfe reveals the humour, vulnerability, frustration and resilience of the woman living through it.

The audience knows the tragedy that awaits her even when Constance herself does not, lending her happiest recollections an increasingly poignant edge.

Giving Constance her voice back

Constance died in Genoa in 1898, not yet forty, after years marked by ill health and upheaval.

But A Forgotten Woman refuses to allow her story to end simply as another chapter in the biography of Oscar Wilde.

Using Constance’s own words alongside carefully researched dramatic writing, Lexi Wolfe creates a portrait filled with warmth, humour and humanity. It becomes not only a story about one forgotten Victorian woman, but about whose lives history chooses to preserve – and whose it allows to disappear.

As Counter Culture observed, the production is ultimately “not just a biographical monologue. It is a reclamation.”