The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Basil Hallward paints a portrait of a beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, and in the painter's studio Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, whose talk about youth and pleasure changes his life. Dorian wishes aloud that the picture might age instead of him, and it does. For twenty years he keeps the face of a boy while the canvas, locked in an upstairs room, records every cruelty, including his treatment of the actress Sibyl Vane and what follows from it. Wilde published the novel in a magazine in 1890 and in expanded form in 1891, adding a preface of aphorisms in reply to reviewers who called it immoral. The book is a Gothic story, a comedy of epigrams and a confession at once. Read it online in your browser on Vinteuil; the first chapter is free.