Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde's True Love by Jonathan Fryer (Constable, 278pp, £18.99 in UK) The Man Who Was Dorian Gray by Jerusha Hull McCormack (Palgrave, 353pp, £16.99 in UK).
More than 80 years after his death, Robert Ross occupies a relatively minor place in English cultural history, remembered primarily for two reasons: as the first man to seduce Oscar Wilde (a feat achieved when Ross was aged only 17); and, much later, as Wilde's loyal literary executor.
These are unusual, and not necessarily complementary, claims on posterity but it seems likely that Ross would have been satisfied even with such a modest stake; among his contemporaries, he was cherished principally for the possession of a self-effacing charm and a steadfast devotion to friends.
When, at the end of 1914, he had been publicly humiliated in the London courts by Lord Alfred Douglas, more than 300 of Ross's admirers organised a testimonial dinner "for one who has been unfailingly at the disposal of any who claimed either his sympathy or his help."
But despite an exceptionally wide social circle and diverse cultural interests - he wrote widely and well on both literature and visual art and for many years managed a gallery in central London - Ross's life remained dominated by Wilde, even after the latter's death in 1900. In part, this was because the younger man felt personally obliged to rescue his late friend's literary reputation and - for the sake of Wilde's two sons with whom he had become friendly - his finances as well. It was Ross who ensured that by 1906 all the dead author's debts had been paid and his bankcruptcy formally discharged, just as it was Ross who, two years later, supervised the publication of a 12-volume Collected Works of Oscar Wilde.
Inevitably, devoting so much time, attention and energy to someone else's concerns meant that his own work usually took second place and so Ross wrote little other than ephemeral journalism; the possession of a private income probably also discouraged him from any obligation to promote himself. But the outcome is that Ross will always be seen refracted through Wilde and this is certainly the case with Jonathan Fryer's new biography.
Quite why the book has now appeared, other than to capitalise on the centenary of Wilde's death, is unclear, as there is no material here not already included in Maureen Borland's 1990 biography of Ross. And like that work, this one is written in a ploddingly pedestrian fashion, replete with anachronisms such as the employment of the term "gay" to describe 19th century homosexuality and basic errors such as Fryer's confusion of the National Gallery of Ireland with Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.
The stylistic flair so glaringly absent in the Ross biography can be found in abundance in Jerusha McCormack's The Man Who was Dorian Gray. Again, however, a great deal of the material she provides has been seen before in the same author's 1991 John Gray: Poet, Dandy & Priest. And the form in which it was originally available may be easier to absorb for many readers than the new book which, while based on enormous quantities of research and clustered with quotes from a wide variety of sources, is presented more in the manner of a novel than a traditional biography.
One immediate difficulty with McCormack's approach is that anyone not already familiar with secondary, but important, characters such as the two Charleses, Ricketts and Shannon and, even more importantly, that strange conjunction of aunt and niece constituting the single writer called Michael Field, may remain confused about their context in both Gray's life and fin de siecle British culture.
On the other hand, Gray himself has forever appeared something of a fictional creation, despite the often brutal reality of his circumstances. Born to working-class parents, he had been obliged by his father to leave school at the age of 13 in order to work as a metal-turner's apprentice at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. But Gray was ambitious, educated himself to sit for Civil Service examinations and, by the time he came to the attention of Wilde, was working in the Foreign Office as well as publishing both poetry and prose.
For a time, it suited both men to imagine that Gray was the inspiration for the character of Dorian; he was extremely handsome, with a perfect profile and a face which showed no evidence of the debauchery in which he claimed to have indulged. In 1893, he published a book of poems, Silverpoints, exquisitely produced and with a cover designed by Ricketts, which - along with The Yellow Book - would come to be regarded as representing the very essence of the English decadent movement. Gray, however, was already in retreat from decadence; shunning Wilde, he formed a lifelong alliance with a rich Jewish aesthete called Andre Raffalovich and in the late 1890s became a Roman Catholic priest.
He and Raffalovich eventually settled in Edinburgh where the latter's money paid for a new parish church meeting Father Gray's aesthetic tastes. The cleric's good looks deteriorated, he took to playing golf but still retained a souvenir of his former existence in the black linen sheets between which he slept and would eventually die exactly four months after Raffalovich had done. His life was an extraordinary trajectory and so perhaps McCormack's approach is the correct one to adopt, as any straightforward narrative could scarcely do justice to the history of John Gray.
Robert O Byrne is an Irish Times journalist. His book, Hugh Lane 1875-1915: A Biography, has just been published by The Lilliput Press