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 (opera) says the dead man is a stranger, apparently a sailor. Demanding to see the body, Dorian is relieved to discover that the dead man is James Vane, although he says he has never seen the man before. "Scene 6" Several weeks later, in Dorian's sitting room, Dorian tells Lord Henry, who is also aged, that he has vowed to reform and offers as proof a story of his having spared a young country girl from sexual exploitation. Lord Henry scoffs and says that Dorian has only made himself feel good whilst possibly breaking the girl's heart. Dorian replies that he