Born a scant three months after her uncle's notorious arrest and raised in the shadow of the greatest scandal of the turn of the twentieth century, Dorothy Irene Wilde was a born writer who never completed the the creative life promised by her famous name and gorgeous imagination. Dolly Wilde made her career in the salons - and the bedrooms - of some of London and Paris's most interesting women and men. Attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, Dolly drenched her prodigious talents in liquids and chemicals, burnt up her opportunities in flamboyant affairs and created a sensation by apparently reliving the life of her infamous uncle. In this very modern biography, Joan Schenkar provides a fascinating look at what it means to live with the talents but not the achievements of biography's usual subjects. She aslo uncovers never-before-published evidence of the hidden life of the Wilde family and of the extraordianry salon society of Natalie Clifford Barney, Dolly Wilde's longest and most fatal attachment.