Dorian Gray is perhaps gothic fiction’s most enigmatic figure. That hasn’t stopped countless creatives putting their own spin on his story, with varying results. Recent decades have placed him in purely horror modes, but it’s all become a bit prosaic, lacking in the nuance of the source material and the Victorian mores that birthed it. It’s as if the process of adaptation itself is a kind of preternatural portrait, leaving the book with less verisimilitude in each retelling. With This Wretched Beauty, the latest in the ongoing ‘remixed classics’ series, here’s the jolt needed to reinvigorate the character. And who better to do it than a trans writer?
Rooting Dorian’s struggles with youth, beauty, and identity into key themes of transness and abuse is a masterstroke. But writer Elle Grenier goes further, drawing a line between the duality of our secret selves and the masks we show the world, and the slow formations of identities through exploration. The power of being seen — even by a controlling, caging observer — is more than is often received from the rest of the world.
Despite some clumsy exposition and occasionally overbearing voice, the book is filled with lines so astute and true, you’ll want to stitch them straight onto your heart. Grenier writes with a fearless passion and a devotion to the gothic bordering on the divine, offering bountiful insights into the messy business of being human.
Although not strictly a historical novel, This Wretched Beauty does play fast and loose with fact. Perhaps for economy of story, to focus more fully on the immediate narrative, especially as so much of what the book explores is concerned with the experience of queer self-discovery in the modern age and all the threats that come with it. Yet the slippages into anachronism, most notably in dialogue, and a dearth of specificity with period detail struggle to enliven its mid-Victorian setting. Through its almost three-hundred pages, the novel lacks the vibrancy or sense of place of 19th-century London, instead relying on literal shades of grey.
Where the novel provides a feast for the senses is for queer and trans readers. There’s an overwhelming, almost sublime, experience to meeting another trans person for the first time, and Grenier conveys Dorian’s first experience here with the quality of a waking dream. It’s beautiful and beguiling, yet guarded. Going further, the central T4T romance conveys the healing power of an unselfish love, one that doesn’t depend on forcing us into shapes that don’t fit properly.
But it’s far from all sweetness and light. The voice of the portrait, imagined or otherwise intruding on Dorian’s thoughts, is realised through a schizophrenia-like experience. Some of the book’s strongest scenes concern Dorian and her portrait, a toxic relationship writ large in a story filled with them. It’s also why the second part of the book, set three years after the first, is the strongest, delving into the idea we’re often the source of our own torment and confinement.
Throughout, the novel is supported with a strong psychological underpinning that can only come from lived experience and a keen emotional perception. Beneath the beautiful veneer is a fascination with the boundary lines of our identities and how those identities are vulnerable to the whims of others. Perhaps most vital of all is making peace with the darker, more selfish parts of us, that forgiveness begins with oneself, and love can only radiate out if it first shines from within. As the story moves towards its ending, it’s clear there isn’t a neat character arc or easy narrative payoff. Dorian continues to struggle with the trauma, selfishness, and self-loathing they’ve dealt with throughout.
This Wretched Beauty doesn’t offer a simple tale of accepting one’s transness and living happily ever after. It’s messy and real with as many forward steps as backslides. Grenier captures the shame as much as those moments of palpable euphoria. Scenes when Dorian first goes out in women’s clothes struck such a familiar chord in this writer, especially around imagined threats, it might have been plucked carnation-like from their own life.
But a nagging question remains. Why is this YA? Dorian begins the original book around twenty-years-old before he stops ageing entirely. Here, it’s a few years younger. For all its achievements, and Grenier’s drive to write the books she wished she’d had as a child, one can’t help but mourn the adult book that might have been with its deeper explorations of passion, vice, sin, sex, and squalor.
Make no mistake, though, this is a transgressive book, a clarion reminding all that the source material is a critical text in the queer canon, but offering a timely reminder that trans people have always existed. Look no further than the final scene with paintings of Dorian as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and, perhaps most radical, Mary Magdalene. The very existence of this book is an act of resistance as surely as being queer in Victorian times or openly trans in the 21st century. And it’s a book our shelves are richer for.
WRITER
Elle Grenier
PUBLISHER
Titan Books
RELEASE
17 February 2026
