This beautiful jacketed hardback presents Oscar Wilde's classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with brand-new, full-colour illustrations by Eugenia Nobati.
This classic novel about the frailty of human beauty and sensual experience and the futility of vanity remains as powerful today as when it was first published in 1891. A truly extraordinary piece of work, The Picture of Dorian Gray has come to be regarded as the finest novel of the aesthetic and decadent movements. In this cautionary tale, the handsome Dorian Gray wishes that his portrait should age rather than himself, and then launches on a life of excess and depravity, with shocking consequences.
Whether you're approaching The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time, or want to experience it afresh with new illustrations, this unabridged collectible edition is perfect for any lover of classic literature.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Arcturus Illustrated Classics series brings together handsome hardcover editions of classic works, beautifully presented with full-colour, specially-commissioned illustrations, patterned endpapers and dust jackets.
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.