A perfect depiction of fin-de-siècle decadence, Oscar Wilde's only novel highlights the tension between the polished surface and murky depths of Victorian high society.
Dorian Gray is young, arrogant and devastatingly handsome. Confronted by his beauty in the form of a portrait, and struck by the terrible realization that he will age, Dorian wishes to retain his charms for ever and finds his desire granted. He abandons himself to a life of hedonism, vice and murder, yet his face remains unmarked by his evil. But, hidden in his attic, the painting ages and corrupts, and one day Dorian must stand face to face with the man he has become.
Parties and Passions, Mrs Dalloway and The Great Gatsby are also available in this Macmillan Collector's Library series of gorgeous paperbacks featuring the greatest parties and the wildest passions in literature.
Oscar Wilde was an 19th century Irish writer whose works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is also one of the Victorian era's most famous dandies, a wit whose good-humored disdain for convention became less favored after he was jailed for homosexuality. Wilde grew up in a prosperous family and distinguished himself at Dublin's Trinity College and London's Oxford. He published his first volume of poems in 1881 and found work in England as a critic and lecturer, but it was his socializing (and self-promotion) that made him famous, even before the 1890 publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1895, at the height of his popularity, his relationship with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas was declared inappropriately intimate by Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde sued for libel, but the tables were turned when it became clear there was enough evidence to charge Wilde with "gross indecency" for his homosexual relationships. He was convicted and spent two years in jail, after which he went into self-imposed exile in France, bankrupt and in ill health.
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