Recommendations
Books Like The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Wilde fiction, Gothic Decadent novels, and books about beauty, corruption, and the Faustian bargain
If The Picture of Dorian Gray seduced you with Wilde's wit and unsettled you with Dorian's fate, these eight works share its preoccupation with beauty as a moral question, its Gothic atmosphere, and its sense of the price of living only for sensation.
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Buy on AmazonThe Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's 1886 Gothic fable of divided self — the nearest Victorian parallel to Dorian Gray; where Dorian's portrait bears his corruption, Jekyll's transformation enacts it bodily.
- 2
Buy on AmazonAgainst Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
The French Decadent novel that Lord Henry gives Dorian and that 'corrupts' him in the novel — the ultimate aesthete's book, a treatise on refined sensation and withdrawal from the world.
- 3
Buy on AmazonDe Profundis
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's letter from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas — the biographical counterpart to Dorian Gray; the aesthete confronting the real consequences of beauty and desire.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's American Dorian — a beautiful, corrupt man whose surface conceals the lie beneath; Gatsby's green light echoes Dorian's portrait as an emblem of the gap between aspiration and moral reality.
- 5
Buy on AmazonLolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's novel of self-serving aestheticism — Humbert's beautiful prose used to conceal his moral horror; the Wildean mode of making the corrupt narrator charming taken to its limit.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe's 1774 epistolary novel of a young man destroyed by the intensity of his own feeling — the Romantic predecessor to Dorian's fate, the original of the aesthetic hero consumed by his own sensibility.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Melmoth the Wanderer
by Charles Maturin
The Gothic ancestor Wilde explicitly acknowledged — Melmoth sells his soul for an extended life; Wilde took the name 'Sebastian Melmoth' after his release from prison.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's masterpiece plays — the same wit and paradox of Dorian Gray deployed in purely comic form, without the Gothic machinery; essential Wilde.
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