English · Advanced
Read The Picture of Dorian Gray in Englishwith every sentence explained
Oscar Wilde · 1890
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About the book
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde was first published in 1890. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under fantasy and horror. It runs to about 78,500 words.
Stay young forever. Let the painting pay the price.
Dorian Gray is the most beautiful young man in London. When the artist Basil Hallward paints his portrait, it is the finest work of his life — and the charming, cynical Lord Henry Wotton whispers to Dorian that youth and beauty are the only things worth having.
Staring at the canvas, Dorian makes a desperate wish: that he might stay young while the picture grows old in his place. Soon he is drawn into a life of pleasure, and the portrait he hides away begins to tell a story his flawless face never will.
Witty, decadent and darkly gripping, Oscar Wilde's only novel caused a scandal in 1890 and remains one of the most quoted books in the English language.
- Author
- Oscar Wilde
- First published
- 1890
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Fantasy, Horror
- Length
- About 78,500 words
How it opens
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
