Publisher's Synopsis
Good novelists, Oscar Wilde wrote, are much rarer than good children. Perhaps it would be lawful to add that good storytellers are even rarer than good novelists. Before The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote the stories that make up The Happy Prince and other stories and completed them with those of A Pomegranate House. It is surprising how an author who dispensed with morals for the benefit of art was able to write these sentimental stories and with a moral. In other hands it would have been a dangerous material; in his own, sentimental tales become poignant, and moral fables become lyric poems of unsuspected beauty.
