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A review by emilymknight
The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.75
When I read The Picture of Dorian Gray early last year, it quickly became one of my favourite classics. And so when I found out that an uncensored version of this novel existed, I knew I had to read it.
For starters, I'm not usually interested in the introductions in books, sometimes they can be quite dense and often give details of the plot away so I usually skip and then sometimes read it after. However, because I already knew of the plot, I read the introduction of this novel and it was SO interesting. I knew of course that Wilde was sent to prison for a reason to do with his homosexuality, but I did not know they literally used the original manuscript for the novel AGAINST HIM IN COURT. After learning of his imprisonment, on what charge he was imprisoned, his wife and sons leaving him and changing their surname, the novel being edited and published without him seeing the edits, etc, I was expecting this uncensored version to be significantly darker, intense and difficult to read, but it was just not... at all. And that for me, just made me appreciate Wilde and his work as an author, to another level.
His style of writing is unmatched for me. Nothing will beat the experience I had when I first read the revised version last year, and I feel like the plot is expanded slightly in that one too while this uncensored version focuses more on the confessions of the characters and their developments ?
For starters, I'm not usually interested in the introductions in books, sometimes they can be quite dense and often give details of the plot away so I usually skip and then sometimes read it after. However, because I already knew of the plot, I read the introduction of this novel and it was SO interesting. I knew of course that Wilde was sent to prison for a reason to do with his homosexuality, but I did not know they literally used the original manuscript for the novel AGAINST HIM IN COURT. After learning of his imprisonment, on what charge he was imprisoned, his wife and sons leaving him and changing their surname, the novel being edited and published without him seeing the edits, etc, I was expecting this uncensored version to be significantly darker, intense and difficult to read, but it was just not... at all. And that for me, just made me appreciate Wilde and his work as an author, to another level.
His style of writing is unmatched for me. Nothing will beat the experience I had when I first read the revised version last year, and I feel like the plot is expanded slightly in that one too while this uncensored version focuses more on the confessions of the characters and their developments ?
''For there is such a little time that your youth will last, such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as golden next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will have its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions that we did not dare to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!''
''To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.''