Book description
Oscar Wilde's audacious drama of social scandal centres around the
revelation of Mrs Arbuthnot's long-concealed secret. A house party is in
full swing at Lady Hunstanton's country home, when it is announced that
Gerald Arbuthnot has been appointed secretary to the sophisticated,
witty Lord Illingworth. Gerald's mother stands in the way of his
appointment, but fears to tell him why, for who will believe Lord
Illingworth to be a man of no importance? Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie
Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. After his marriage to Constance
Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with
little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction,
The Happy Prince
(1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
(1891) and A House of Pomegranates
(1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an
original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal
success of his Society Comedies Lady Windermere's Fan
, A Woman of No Importance
, An Ideal Husband
and The Importance of Being Earnest
, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895. Success,
however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen in love with
Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its
height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's
father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials
later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross
indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of
Reading Gaol
. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate
self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in
1900.
