The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde
A comedy skewering Victorian high society.
5 chapters · 20,598 words · about 2 hours
Contents
About this book
The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde’s most popular play today, enduring thanks to its easy humor, witty dialog, and clever satire. It was also one of his more successful plays, despite its first run being prematurely ended after only 86 performances. The main characters pretend to be other people in order to escape social obligations, with the resulting confusion of identities driving the plot and the humor behind it.
Earnest also holds the sad distinction of being Wilde’s last published play. A feud with an aristocrat whose son was Wilde’s lover led to a court case revealing Wilde as a homosexual—a crime in those days, and punishable by imprisonment with hard labor.
About this edition
This edition comes from Standard Ebooks, whose volunteers carefully proofread public-domain books and give their own work to the public domain too. The book is in the public domain in the US, and wherever copyright ends 70 years after its author’s death, so you’re free to read, copy and share it.
The cover is adapted from Aubrey Beardsley, a painting completed in 1895 by Jacques-Émile Blanche.