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 Who Wrote Frankenstein that while he argues that Mary Shelley was not well educated enough to have written "Frankenstein", his argument fails because "it is not a good, let alone a great novel and hardly merits the attention it has been given." Lauritsen replied that "Frankenstein" "is a radical and disturbing work, containing some of the most beautiful prose in the English language ... a profound and moving masterpiece, fully worthy of its author, Percy Bysshe Shelley." "The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein" received positive reviews from Jim Herrick in "Gay Humanist Quarterly", Hubert Kennedy in "The Guide", and Douglas Sadownick in "The Gay