Basil Hallward has painted the best thing he will ever do, and he does not want to exhibit it. He is afraid he has put too much of himself into it. The subject is Dorian Gray: twenty years old, extravagantly beautiful, and until this afternoon entirely unaware of it.
 
Lord Henry Wotton makes him aware. In an hour of talk in a Mayfair garden he explains to Dorian exactly what his face is worth, how briefly he will own it, and how much of a life is wasted on being good. Dorian looks at the finished portrait and wishes idly that the canvas might take the years instead.
 
Over the next eighteen years Dorian works his way through London and through people, and his face keeps its perfect blankness throughout. Only the picture, locked in the schoolroom at the top of the house, keeps an honest record of what he has become.
 
Wilde published it in 1890. Five years later, passages from it were read aloud in a courtroom as evidence against him.
 
About MIRARI QUEER CLASSICS
Queer literature has a peculiar publishing history: much of it reaches us pre-edited by people who were frightened of it. Editors cut. Authors pre-emptively softened. Censors banned. Estates tidied. What survives on the shelf is often the version that was allowed through, not the version that was written.
 
Mirari Queer Classics publishes one out-of-copyright work a year in its original form, restoring what was removed. Each edition carries a foreword by a prominent queer South African writer, commissioned to contextualise the title in 21st century South Africa.
 
This is a South African series for a reason. Ours is a country that banned books by law within living memory and then became the first in the world to write sexual orientation into its constitution. We are unusually well placed to notice what censorship does to a text, and unusually entitled to undo it.
 
One book a year. Uniform design. Built to be collected.