Vyvyan Holland

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Vyvyan Holland

Vyvyan Wilde c.1895

Vyvyan Holland OBE, LLB, (November 3, 1886 – October 10, 1967), born in London as Vyvyan Oscar Beresford Wilde, was a British author and translator. He was the second son of Oscar Wilde and Constance Lloyd, after his brother Cyril. After Wilde was convicted of the charge of "gross indecency" and imprisoned, Lloyd changed her surname, and those of their sons, to Holland.^[1] He was educated at Stonyhurst College.

Due to antipathy to his father, Vyvyan Holland was denied admittance to the University of Oxford,^[2] and instead studied Law at Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge [1] from 1905, but tiring of his studies he left the college in 1907.[2] On 20 July 1909, Holland accompanied his father's old friend, Robert Ross, to witness the reburial of his father's remains from Bagneux Cemetery to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Aged 22, Holland resumed his study of Law and became a barrister in 1912. He began to write poetry and short stories.[3]

Holland's first wife was Violet Craigie, whom he married in 1913. At the start of World War I in 1914 he was first commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Interpreters Corps, but later transferred into 114 Battery, XXV Bde Royal Field Artillery. Holland was demobilised on 27 July 1919, and was awarded the OBE. He went on to become an author and translator. At the beginning of the Second World War, Holland was offered a position as a translator and editor for the BBC, a post he held for six years. In September 1943, he married his second wife, Dorothy Thelma Helen Besant, a beautician (born Melbourne, Australia 19 June 1910 - died 1 March 1995 in London).[4], a great-great niece of Theosophist Annie Besant.[5]

In 1947, Holland and Thelma Holland left for Australia and New Zealand, where Mrs. Holland had been invited to give lectures on fashionable dress in 19th-century Australia.[6]

Their only child, Merlin Holland, became a publisher, a dealer in glass and ceramics, and a writer who edited and published several works about his grandfather. Merlin's son, Lucian, was born in 1979.

Vyvyan Holland died in London in 1967 aged 80.