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Oscar Wilde wrote his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, after he had published his collection of children’s stories, The Happy Prince, and before his glittering successes in the theatre that peaked with The Importance of Being Earnest. The story is a mixture of fable and gothic melodrama: a beautiful young man is granted a wish that he will never grow old, while a painted portrait of him bears the evidence of a life given to pleasure and depravity. In it Wilde entertains some of his preoccupations with interior design and homosexuality — but above all his concern was to make of the novel a beautiful work of art, with the proviso that “all art is quite useless”.