To have your life changed by a book can be a simultaneously humbling and inspiring rite of passage. The idea that the printed page, that centuries-old technology for transmitting the contents of an individual mind to a disparate audience whom the author will never know, should retain such improbable power becomes ever more miraculous, the further our culture departs from the bookish temperament.

Thomas Wright bought an Oscar Wilde compendium in a secondhand bookshop in Cambridge 20 years ago and began reading The Picture of Dorian Gray the same day. By the time he applied to Oxford, he had read Wilde’s allegorical novel close on twenty times and feels that the enduring, magical obsession it conjured in him helped him to coast through the interview at Magdalen College with "a certain Wildean panache".

Oscar’s Books is a brave idea. It is a new biography of sorts, but one that attempts to illuminate the living Wilde through the man’s own reading. Wright has transcribed the marginal notes from the fifty or so volumes once owned by the writer still in existence and even managed to buy one of Wilde’s own books at auction. This book, which he now calls "my precious", lay on Wright’s desk during the writing of this study, "just as it once lay on Wilde’s".

If there is something a touch spooky about this, it is by no means unheard-of. The cult of Oscar inspires mystical devotion in many of those who come under its sway, even if they have only seen Stephen Fry in the film biopic or one of English theatre’s grandes dames doing Lady Bracknell, rather than read, say, Wilde’s political essay, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ or his early poems.

Wright’s work tries to restore to us the full range of Wilde’s literary intellect. He was an outstanding scholar of the Greek and Latin classics at Dublin and Oxford, had an unerring eye for the best in contemporary French fiction and treasured the great Victorian studies in Renaissance culture. He also, as is more familiar, rather enjoyed the era’s gay porn and had a perhaps surprising taste for adventure novels.

What this isn’t, though, is the literary biography it might initially be mistaken for. There is no particularly penetrating attempt to plot the coordinates of Wilde’s textual sources through his own works. Instead, we linger over lovingly done pen-portraits of Oscar in the library of his Chelsea home, scribbling in the margins of books while he read, slopping jam on the page, abstractedly tearing bits off the edges and nibbling on them, regularly putting aside a volume to receive another delegation of awestruck apostles and rent boys.

There are whole wads of unabashed speculation ("We can imagine him…", "Perhaps he even…", "It would not be at all surprising to learn…"), and the author’s devotion is such that the cut-glass tone never wavers. He has an inordinate fondness for the word 'portal' to refer to what coarser types know as a 'doorway': "We do not know the precise moment the boy entered the fiery-coloured world of the Bard’s plays, nor can we identify the specific volume that provided a portal into it".

The premise that Wilde’s entire psychology was a literary construct is stretching a point. To claim that "I traced his sexuality back to the pages of Plato" (as opposed to, say, anything genetic) is an overwrought anachronism. But this is the viscerally familiar Wilde of the scented handkerchief, the green carnation, the withering epigram and the house full of beautiful things. The more infuriating Oscar, the piss-elegant snob who let his wife and children rot while he teetered from one drunken shag to another, has been all but refused admittance.

Read our interview with Thomas Wright and his list of Wilde's Top Five Books.

Oscar's Books, by Thomas Wright
Published by: Chatto & Windus, an imprint of The Random House Group
Released: 4 September 2008
ISBN: 0701180617

Buy Thomas Wright's Oscar's Books online. You'll save money to put towards his earlier book, Oscar Wilde's Table Talk.