Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal

Did Oscar Wilde write Teleny? Certainly, it has often been attributed to him, in whole or in part. It is a problem that has exercised bibliographers of "curiosa" since the first plublication of the 1883 edition, limited to 200 copies.

The lush prose of this classic of homosexual love has great similarities with that of The Picture of Dorian Grey. It recounts, in painfully graphic terms, the progress of the obsessive passion felt by Camille Des Grieux for Rene Teleny. The hot-house atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Paris is wonderfully evoked, and lends to this first great homosexual novel the claustrophobic atmosphere that characterized the love that dare not speak its name.