What is the best Oscar Wilde work?

Society comedies share the field with prison writing, fairy tales and the one novel that scandalised its first readers. Pick the Wilde you would hand to a friend first.

1. 1
   The Picture of Dorian Gray

   Wilde's only novel, first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890 and expanded into a book in 1891.
2. 2
   The Importance of Being Earnest

   A comedy of mistaken identities that premiered at the St James's Theatre in London on 14 February 1895.
3. 3
   An Ideal Husband

   A play about a government minister whose past secret threatens his career, first staged at the Haymarket Theatre in January 1895.
4. 4
   Lady Windermere's Fan

   Wilde's first society comedy, premiered at the St James's Theatre in February 1892.
5. 5
   A Woman of No Importance

   A play about an illegitimate son and his mother, premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in April 1893.
6. 6
   Salome

   A one-act tragedy Wilde wrote in French, published in 1893 and issued in English in 1894 with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.
7. 7
   The Happy Prince and Other Tales

   An 1888 collection of five fairy tales, including "The Selfish Giant" and "The Nightingale and the Rose".
8. 8
   A House of Pomegranates

   An 1891 collection of four fairy tales, among them "The Young King" and "The Fisherman and his Soul".
9. 9
   The Canterville Ghost

   A comic novella about an American family who move into a haunted English country house, first serialised in 1887.
10. 10
    Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

    An 1887 story about a young aristocrat told by a palm reader that he will commit a murder, later the title story of an 1891 collection.
11. 11
    The Ballad of Reading Gaol

    A long poem written in exile after Wilde's release from prison, published in 1898 under the name "C.3.3.", his cell number.
12. 12
    De Profundis

    A long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that Wilde wrote in Reading Gaol in 1897, first published in abridged form in 1905.

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