The Prelude to Teleny

The Prelude to Teleny (1899) is an erotic novel published anonymously, yet often attributed to Irish playwright Oscar Wilde. A loosely related prequel to the novel Teleny (1893), which is considered one of the first works of fiction to openly depict homosexuality, The Prelude to Teleny is the story of a young girl’s sexual awakening and subsequent downfall, as well as of the son she bears. “My childhood was a very dull one. I am hardly certain whether I remember my mother or not, for I was only about two years old when she died. By an effort it seems to me that I can recollect having been taken into a dark hushed room, where she was asleep—of having been lifted on a couch and made to kiss her. Her face was as white as marble, seemed quite as cold; so that the contact of my warm lips with that clammy flesh produced an indelible impression upon me.” Before she was reduced to this lifeless state, Camille Des Grieux was a young girl with her whole life ahead of