The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

In 1984, the novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for authors under the age of 35.^[1][2] The Glasgow Herald, which called it "brilliant and moving",^[3] singled it out as a novel missing from the Booker Prize shortlist.^[4]

In 2005, looking back at Ackroyd's career to date, The Guardian noted that the novel displays "a gift for literary ventriloquism that would become something of a signature style"^[5] In 2019, S.J. Parris described Ackroyd as the master of writing "convincingly in the language of the past without going full hey-nonny-nonny" and this novel as a pitch-perfect imitation of period dialogue.^[6]

It has been the subject of a number of critical works, focussing on it as an example of postmodernism and as an example of fictional biography, especially fictional biographies of Wilde.^[7][8] Martin Middeke finds that the work functions as a novel "that masterly performs all elements of postmodern fiction", as a detailed, carefully researched account of Wilde's life, and as "a pastiche of the highest quality, a brilliant stylistic imitation of Wilde's witty, paradoxical and ironic style".^[9] Laura Savu notes "the heterogeneity and complexity of his writing, which justifies labels as diverse as postmodern, neo-Gothic, metaphysical-detective, and historiographic metafictional".^[10]

• Ukko Hänninen: Rewriting Literary History: Peter Ackroyd and Intertextuality Archived 10 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine
• 1983 BBC interview with Peter Acroyd about The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

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