Lord Alfred Douglas. The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas. First Edition. London, Martin Secker, 1929. 21 x 17 cm. (4), 340 pages. Complete with 8 Plates, as listed. Original blue textured cloth. Gilt title on front board and spine. Rebacked in 2024 using the original board and spine. New end papers. Very good condition. Some shelf wear, rubbing and bumping (see images). Sound binding (rebacked). Edges dust dulled. Internally clean.

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (1870 – 1945), also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married a poet, Olive Custance, in 1902 and had a son, Raymond.
On converting to Catholicism in 1911, he repudiated homosexuality, and in a Catholic magazine, Plain English, expressed openly antisemitic views, but rejected the policies of Nazi Germany. He was jailed for libelling Winston Churchill over claims of World War I misconduct. Douglas wrote several books of verse, some in a homoerotic Uranian genre. The phrase “The love that dare not speak its name” appears in one (Two Loves), though it is widely misattributed to Wilde.

• Keywords: Biography & Literary Criticism · History · History & Culture · Literature · Modern Literature
• Language: English
• First edition
• Inventory Number: 104071AB

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