User:Del!9/Dorothy Wilde

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Edit summary: I have copied the below information from the Dorothy Wilde Wikipedia article.

Early life
Born on July 11, 1895 in London, three months after her uncle Oscar Wilde's arrest for homosexual acts, Dorothy Wilde was the only child of Oscar's older brother, Willie, and his second wife, Sophie Lily Lees. Though Wilde had never met her uncle, she idolized him. She said she was "more Oscar-like than he was like himself."

Her father, who was violently alcoholic, died just a few years after her birth. This left her under the care of her mother and stepfather, translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, though at the time, her mother was “so impoverished that she could not afford to keep her at home” and sent young Wilde away to what she described as a “country convent.” Wilde spoke little of her childhood, with only one story ever told. As recorded by Parisian raconteuse Bettina Bergery, “when Dolly was very young, she used to like to take lumps of sugar, dip them in her pretty mother Lily's perfume, and eat them.”

World War I
In 1914, she travelled to France in order to drive an ambulance in World War I. About 1917 or 1918, while both were living in Paris, she had an affair with one of her fellow ambulance drivers, Standard Oil heiress Marion "Joe" Carstairs, who in the 1920s became a speedboat racer and was known as "the fastest woman on water." Although she "revelled in" attracting both men and women, Wilde was a lesbian.

Addictions and later life
Wilde drank to excess and was addicted to heroin. She went through several detoxification attempts, none successful; she emerged from one nursing-home stay with a new dependency on the sleeping pill paraldehyde, then available over-the-counter.

In 1939 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and refused surgery, seeking alternative treatments. The following year, with the Germans approaching Paris, she fled to England. She died aged 45 in 1941, of "causes unascertainable", according to the coroner's inquest—possibly the cancer or possibly a drug overdose.