For Fans of Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray has been called a Gothic novel, a philosophical fable, an aestheticist manifesto, and an indictment of its own author's beliefs. It is all of these at once. Lord Henry Wotton dispenses aphorisms like a man who has never had to live with the consequences of one; Basil Hallward loves Dorian with a sincerity that condemns him. The portrait is the mechanism, but the real subject is what it costs to treat life as a work of art and other people as accessories to it. Wilde wrote the novel in a single sustained burst and then spent years distancing himself from it. He should not have worried: the book is more honest than he perhaps intended.

The Happy Prince seems like a story for children. A gilded statue gives away his gold leaf and jeweled eyes, piece by piece, to the poor. A swallow stays to help until winter kills it. Wilde wrote this while his sons were young, but the grief inside it belongs to an adult who has been paying attention. The giant who builds a wall around his garden to keep children out, the fisherman who trades his soul for a mermaid's love: these are parables about what happens when beauty is hoarded or when the self becomes more important than connection. Read alongside the plays, they reveal that Wilde's wit was always in conversation with a quieter, more wounded register.

The Importance of Being Earnest runs on a very specific engine: characters who take trivial things with deadly seriousness and serious things with complete lightness. Gwendolen and Cecily argue over the moral superiority of the name Ernest; Jack and Algernon construct elaborate fictional alter-egos to escape social obligation. Wilde wrote it in three weeks and called it a trivial comedy for serious people, which is exactly right. The comedy holds because the social world being satirized is itself absurd: a world where a man's eligibility depends on who his parents were, where a woman's diary is her only honest record. Nearly every drawing-room comedy since has borrowed something from this play without always knowing it.