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    The Happy Prince
    The Happy Prince
    The Happy Prince
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    The Happy Prince

    Written by Oscar Wilde

    Narrated by Anton Lesser

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Oscar Wilde’s fairy stories are among the greatest and most poignant classics for children and adults alike. Humour, pathos and delightful little characters abound in the stories of "The Happy Prince" and the Swallow who agrees to keep him company despite approaching winter; "The Selfish Giant", who doesn’t want children playing in his garden, and "The Remarkable Rocket". In addition, there are those not so familiar – "The Star Child", "The Young King" and "The Devoted Friend".

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJun 23, 1998
    ISBN9789629544409
    Author

    Oscar Wilde

    Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish poet and playwright who rose to global fame in the 1880s as a larger-than-life public persona with plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, and Lady Windermere's Fan. The author of countless brilliant epigrams that form part of our popular lexicon, he was sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison for having relations with men, which ruined his reputation and career. Upon his release he exiled himself in France, where he died penniless. Today Wilde is celebrated as a courageous crusader for free expression, gay love, and anyone oppressed by hypocritical conventions.

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    Reviews for The Happy Prince

    4/5

    14 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The stories include a wide variety of characters and settings, but all share a common thread – love, sacrifice, kindness, and the possible dangers of not having them. On the surface, these may appear as simple fairy tales to a child, but Wilde packed each story with heartfelt meaning. There are tales of true friendship, as seen in The Happy Prince, and false friendship, in The Devoted Friend. The same selfless love and sacrifice that is received with gladness in The Selfish Giant, is sadly spurned in The Nightingale and the Rose. If only the rocket in The Remarkable Rocket had read a few of these tales, his life might have been a great deal happier. Wilde’s eloquent and poetic writing makes the stories a joy to read out loud. They are an excellent read for any little dreamers or future romantics you may know. However, a word of warning: expect to shed a few tears.
    • 3/5
      The story in here I enjoyed the most is the only one considered to not be a fairy tale, The Canterville Ghost. I found this quite fun. The others were not quite what I expected. The religious content was a surprise. And the shying away from happy endings felt quite brutal.I read this with the intention of then giving it to my daughter to read, but now I'm not so sure that she'll find them enjoyable.
    • 5/5
      Great book and narrative. Worth listening to it. Highly Recommended!
    • 5/5
      Read "The Selfish Giant", which is included in the stories. A lovely message from a wonderful writer.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautiful little collection of stories. I thought I'd never read any of them, but I'd definitely read "The Selfish Giant" before, and some of the others seemed familiar. The stories are all a little like fairy tales, though, so that's probably part of it.

      My favourites were "The Nightingale and the Rose" and "The Fisherman and His Soul", I think. All of them are lovely, though. I especially like the beginning of Star-Child. Some of the lines in it are gorgeous, like: "And when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her." I remember loving "The Selfish Giant" when I was little: I was very Christian then and the ending, with the Christ imagery, used to make me cry. It's still a lovely image to me now, and I like the last line: "And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms."

      These aren't exactly happy stories -- The Happy Prince's heart breaks, the Nightingale dies, the dwarf in The Birthday of the Infanta hates himself, and the Fisherman loses his little Mermaid -- but when you read a lot of old fairy tales you find out that actually, they aren't. I'm glad I picked this up to read.
    • 3/5
      Probably a mistake to read these for the first time as an adult. I couldn't avoid becoming tired of Oscar's languid boys, lolling about the place with their alabaster skin and violet eyes. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the female characters were so utterly lacking in any 3-dimensionality, often only described in one brief sentence, that it started to piss me off. I can imagine having been moved by these if I'd read them as a child, or even as a self-absorbed melancholy adolescent: indeed they would resonate most strongly with the latter life-stage. At the very least I would have been less cynical.Oscar wrote these for his sons, and they couldn't have been older than 6 when he published the second of the collections. I'm all for a bit of light-hearted gore in fairy-tales, but Wilde takes it over the top on just about every occasion.The second collection (something something Pomegranates) seemed to hold together and work better as children's stories than the first, but holy MOLEY way to make small children cry with the ending of the last story, Oscar! Gor blimey!Favourites were the one about the grumpy giant and his garden (where nobody died, I seem to recall--amazing, me think it! Edited to add: I was wrong.), 'The Fisherman and his Soul' (some gruesome, and methought gratuitous for a kiddy's story, killing as well as a few deaths) and 'The Star Child'... until that last sentence, which just made me laugh it was so bloody nasty!