A Woman of No Importance (New Mermaids) - Softcover

Wilde, Oscar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0713673516 ISBN 13: 9780713673517

Publisher: Methuen Drama, 2004

Synopsis

Staged in 1893, when Wilde had already achieved fame, wealth and
notoriety, A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse comedy
of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man on the
make, with an American heiress and the post of secretary to the
brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach. When he asks
his mother to celebrate with them, it turns out that Illingworth is
Gerald's father, who seduced and abandoned his mother twenty years
earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition, and Gerald declines the
association with Illingworth. This edition, which also analyses Wilde's
various drafts and revisions of the play, argues that the playwright
here continued to explore the rivalry between an older man and woman
for the affection of a beautiful young man.

About this title

Review:

Classic Wilde in many respects: a comic melodrama populated by a combination of stuffy society types and devil-may-care Wildean stand-ins whose quips and paradoxical epigrams cut through the delusions and hypocrisies of their milieu. --Irish Theatre Magazine

About the Author:

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1856. In the years following his graduation from Oxford in 1878 he published poems and stories which included The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lady Windermere's Fan was produced in 1892, A Woman of No Importance in 1893 and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. Later work included De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He died in 1900.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0713673516
• ISBN 13: 9780713673517
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 174
• Editor: Small Ian