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  • Published: 3 September 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099511144
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $17.99

The Picture of Dorian Gray




Oscar Wilde's only novel: dark, captivating and intensely Victorian

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IRVINE WELSH

Dorian is a good-natured young man until he discovers the power of his own exceptional beauty. As he gradually sinks deep into a frivolous, glamorous world of selfish luxury, he apparently remains physically unchanged by the stresses of his corrupt lifestyle and untouched by age. But up in his attic, hidden behind a curtain, his portrait tells a different story...

  • Published: 3 September 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099511144
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $17.99

About the author

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. He then lived in London and married Constance Lloyd in 1884. Wilde was a leader of the Aesthetic Movement. He became famous because of the immense success of his plays such as Lady Windemere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 but was revised in 1891 after moralistic negative reviews.

After a public scandal involving Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was sentenced to two years' hard labour in Reading Gaol for 'gross indecency'. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published anonymously in 1898. Wilde never lived in England again and died at the age of forty-six in Paris on 30 November 1900. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery where admirers often leave the lipstick marks of kisses on his tomb.

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Praise for The Picture of Dorian Gray

[A] remarkable work of imagination...A wonderfully entertaining parable of the aesthetic ideal

Guardian

There's an incurable disease afflicting females - ageing. Men, on the other hand, never pass their amuse-by dates. Sean Connery is still cutting the sex god mustard and, if time flies, then HE has frequent air miles. Yet, you never hear a man described as mutton dressed as ram, now do you? This is a book about a bloke who realises that the night is young, but he is not...

Kathy Lette

A heady late-Victorian tale of double-living

Sarah Waters

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde set the gold standard for chroniclers of decadence

Guardian

Very decadent and Victorian

Savidge Reads