The Picture of Dorian Gray

This is the original, overtly homoerotic version of the book that first appeared in 1890.

"I fear my high school English teacher did me great harm in assigning my class to read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as part of what she called her "trilogy of terror" (the other books in the trilogy were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein). But the harm is not what you might suppose. I felt in no way corrupted by Wilde's novel. I merely felt let down. As a gay teenager in the 1970s, I was desperately seeking information—any information—about my own kind. I had heard, somehow, that Oscar Wilde was a fellow traveler. But, alas, when I read the book, I found little evidence that Wilde was gay. The teacher made no references to the subject, and the class read the book oblivious to its ever having been controversial. We were reading, of course, the expurgated version, which became the official version and remains so to this day. Later in life I had the same experience with De Profundis. Having heard that this work was Wilde's defense of "the love that dare not speak its name," I was perplexed and not at all delighted to find it nothing of the sort. I was reading, of course, the expurgated version. As with The Picture of Dorian Gray, I did not realize this and did not consider the possibility that another version existed. Thus, while I found The Importance of Being Earnest quite clever in its humor, and found Wilde's fairy tales good enough, I regarded Wilde on the whole as something of a disappointment, who never clearly stated his attraction to his own sex in his writing. This volume containing the original, overtly homoerotic version of the book that first appeared in 1890, corrects all of that." -- Michael Wilson

Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. We also publish nonfiction, including textbooks, as well as contemporary fiction that is literary, unusual, and provocative. watersgreen.wixsite.com/watersgreenhouse