The Vane Sisters Erythraean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word. Sybil Vane is also a character in Oscar Wilde's only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. She is an actress who commits suicide when Dorian rejects her, first causing the portrait to change and Dorian to notice the connection between him and the portrait. The apparent uniqueness of this narrative approach has created fame for this story, and Nabokov himself described this device as something that 'can only be tried once in a thousand years of fiction'. The trick
The Picture of Dorian Gray with Sibyl, but he is too late, as Lord Henry informs him that Sibyl has killed herself. Dorian then understands that, where his life is headed, lust and beauty shall suffice. Dorian locks the portrait up, and over the following eighteen years, he experiments with every vice, influenced by a morally poisonous French novel that Lord Henry Wotton gave him. One night, before leaving for Paris, Basil goes to Dorian's house to ask him about rumours of his self-indulgent sensualism. Dorian does not deny his debauchery, and takes Basil to see the portrait. The portrait has become so hideous that