One moment in Sean O’Toole’s Dorian Unbound: Transnational Decadence and the Wilde Archive stands out to me as exemplifying O’Toole’s profound openness to what the archive has to tell us about a novel we thought we already knew. O’Toole has been laying out his case for seeing Wilhelm Meinhold’s 1849 Gothic novel Sidonia the Sorceress as a possible influence upon Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Meinhold’s novel was translated into English by Wilde’s mother, had been the subject of paintings by Edward Burne-Jones, and was adored by the Pre-Raphaelites more broadly. It features a magical portrait and a dangerous, murderous beauty, although Wilde queers the latter aspect of Meinhold’s novel when he “reconfigures the trope of the femme fatale or erotic stunner as a fatally attractive young man” (p. 77). Meinhold’s sorceress curses her enemies with sterility, and if we look closely at Dorian Gray we see...

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