The Picture of Dorian Gray biography, "Oscar Wilde" (1989), the literary critic Richard Ellmann said that: Wilde does not name the book, but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost [was], Huysmans's "À rebours" ... to a correspondent, he wrote that he had played a 'fantastic variation' upon "À rebours", and someday must write it down. The references in "Dorian Gray" to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate. Some commentators have suggested that "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was influenced by the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's (anonymously published) first novel "Vivian Grey" (1826) as, "a kind of homage from one outsider to
The Man in Grey (novel) The Man in Grey (novel) The Man in Grey was a novel by the British writer Lady Eleanor Smith first published in 1941. It was a melodrama set in Regency Britain. A young woman unhappily married to a cold aristocrat falls in love with a strolling actor, but her hopes of eloping to happiness are wrecked by an old school friend who murders her in order to be able to marry her husband. In 1943 the novel was adapted into a film by Gainsborough Pictures directed by Leslie Arliss and starring James Mason in the title role as well as