The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde's only novel is the signature work of the Aestheticism movement, a brilliantly unsettling fable in which a portrait ages and decays while its subject, Dorian Gray, retains his youth and beauty. The novel poses searching questions about the relationship between art and morality, pleasure and conscience. Its epigrammatic wit and gothic undertones have made it one of the most enduring works of late Victorian fiction.

Published at the height of late Victorian aestheticism, the novel scandalized contemporary readers with its themes of hedonism and moral corruption. Wilde's subsequent prosecution and imprisonment in 1895 lent the book an aura of martyrdom, and it became a central text of the Decadence movement that challenged bourgeois moral certainties across Europe.