Author
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer, playwright and the most dazzling wit of the Victorian age, a herald of aestheticism: the idea that art exists for the sake of beauty, not for usefulness or morality. Why he wrote this book. “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890) is his only novel, and the idea came to him almost by chance. Once, while sitting for his own portrait, Wilde remarked what a pity it was that he would grow old and not the image on the canvas, and the whole story grew out of that offhand remark. The novel took in Wilde’s central faith, the cult of beauty and pleasure, and at the same time his secret fear: the fear of paying for a double life, the kind that so many in respectable society led, himself included. How it was received. The public accused the book of immorality. In reply, Wilde added a defiant preface to the 1891 edition: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” A few years later his own fate would tragically echo the novel: a trial, disgrace, and a fall from the very top of society.
Books in Livria
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
A young man gets what everyone secretly dreams of, and at first he is happy. But beauty has to be paid for, and the reckoning has already begun: quietly, in the one place he tries never to look. A novel about the price…