This article comes from the July 30, 2011, edition of The Australian.
SO you think you know Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray? If so, this elegant volume will prove you wrong.

It is Wilde’s original, unexpurgated typescript of the novel, unpublished for more than 120 years, and incorporates passages modified or excised in all subsequent editions.

Wilde’s only full-length novel, it exists in at least three versions: the author’s typescript with handwritten amendments as originally submitted to the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890; the magazine’s published version following editorial changes; and the standard book version incorporating the author’s additions, modifications and cuts, published in April 1891.

Why three versions? The answer lies in the book’s barely disguised homosexual content, oblique and coded but sufficiently plain to attract hostile reviews and to persuade Wilde, following the novel’s debut in Lippincott’s, to tone it down for the 1891 book version.

It’s a revelatory exercise to examine the text of Wilde’s original typescript, which is held in a library at the University of California. 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.”

That was the tragic climax to the writer’s infatuation with the contemptible “Bosie” (Lord Alfred Douglas), the dissolute son of the half-mad Marquess of Queensberry. When Queensberry publicly branded Wilde a sodomite, Bosie persuaded the writer to sue for libel.

The worst mistake of Wilde’s life, it brought his fame as poet, playwright, novelist and wit to a humiliating and ignominious end. He was only 46 when, ill and impoverished, he died in a cheap Paris hotel on November 20, 1900.

Sumptuously designed, this edition of Dorian Gray is beautifully illustrated with contemporary drawings and photographs and features notes beside the text in which editor Nicholas Frankel provides informative and illuminating comments that significantly enrich the reading experience.

Despite its metamorphoses The Picture of Dorian Gray remains a chilling and powerful tale, its literary ancestry traceable to the Faust legend but more notably to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with which it shares a fascination with good-evil dichotomies.

For the complete article, visit http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/after-120-years-oscar-wildes-dorian-gray-in-all-its-uncut-glory/story-e6frg8nf-1226102875254

The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition
By Oscar Wilde
Edited by Nicholas Frankel
Harvard University Press, 295pp, $44.99 (HB)