- Includes detailed historical context and detailed textual annotations
In 1890, Oscar Wilde submitted the typescript of his new novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, to the editor of Lippincotts Monthly Magazine, which had contracted to publish it. Shocked by what he read, the editor proceeded, without Wildes knowledge, to cut numerous explicit or suggestive passages. After the outcry following the magazines publication, Wilde was pressured into making further changes for the 1891 release of the novel in book form. Every version of the book published since has used this heavily-censored 1891 text. Until now.
Stonewall Riot Press is pleased to present the first ebook edition of the novel Oscar Wilde actually wrote, the one he intended the public to read. Shocking, erotic, at times even pornographic, Wildes original Picture of Dorian Gray is both a braver and more moving work than the version readers have always known. In this meticulously-edited edition, based on the authors unpublished typescript and specially formatted for Kindle, readers can finally experience Wildes masterpiece as he intended it, free from the homophobic censorship that has marred it for over a century.
The version that Wilde submitted to Lippincott's is the better fiction. It has the swift and uncanny rhythm of a modern fairy tale and Dorian is the greatest of Wilde's fairy tales.
Alex Ross (New Yorker)
It's a revelatory exercise to examine the text of Wilde's original typescript. It yields a deeper understanding of its author and of the hypocrisy and intolerance of late-Victorian English society which led to his two-year imprisonment for gross indecency. Joel Greenberg (The Australian)
The typescript is, besides truer to Wilde's original intentions, a vastly better novel than the one most of us know. To call Wilde's earlier version leaner would miss the flavor and point of this aestheticism-drenched work, but it's a swifter, bolder, more uncompromising, less moralistic and in every respect more affecting work than its edited, rewritten, or otherwise censored versions. Tim Pfaff (Bay Area Reporter)