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.
