A young man of staggering beauty named Dorian Gray sits for his portrait in the studio of the painter Basil Hallward. There he meets Lord Henry Wotton, who fills his head with a single idea: youth and beauty are everything, and nothing else matters. Dorian wishes that the portrait would age and suffer in his place. The wish is granted.
Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890. It is the only novel he wrote, and it scandalised London the moment it appeared. Across the next eighteen years on the page, Dorian remains beautiful while every cruelty, betrayal, and crime registers on the canvas locked in his attic. The painting becomes a record of his soul. It is the kind of book Lord Henry would have written if he ever wrote anything.
Wilde's English is famously aphoristic — a sentence will set up a moral platitude and then invert it in the second clause. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Storica's adaptation preserves Wilde's wit and brings the novel to B2 across twenty-five chapters, keeping the great set-pieces (the wish, the actress, the murder, the discovery in the attic).
Wilde's English is ornate but profoundly logical. Every paradox follows a clean grammatical structure. Once a B2 reader has the rhythm of an Wildean sentence, the rest follows. The novel is short — under three hundred pages in the original — and most of it is dialogue. The vocabulary is upper-class London but rarely truly rare.
Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Picture of Dorian Gray was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B2. Upper intermediate. You read literary novels, follow nuance, handle conditional and subjunctive. You can argue, summarise, and reflect in writing. The plateau is behind you.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is rated B2, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
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