The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

Published: 19 September 2016
ISBN: 9781784871529
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
RRP: $22.99

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The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

Oscar Wilde

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A selection of Oscar Wilde's best and most important plays - sharp, relevant and brilliant to this day

A selection of Oscar Wilde's best and most important plays - sharp, relevant and brilliant to this day.

Who would have thought a comedy of manners written more than a hundred years ago would still be so apt and so funny? Oscar Wilde was a genius of play-writing, and his deftness, wit and sharp eye for social satire keep audiences in thrall to this day. Alongside Earnest, discover a biblical tragedy retold, Lady Windemere and her infamous fan and Wilde's take on an ideal husband, in this selection of Wilde's most important plays.

‘[The Importance of Being Earnest] has a strong claim to being the most perfect comedy in the English language’ Daily Telegraph

Published: 19 September 2016
ISBN: 9781784871529
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
RRP: $22.99

Categories:

Share…

About the author

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. He then lived in London and married Constance Lloyd in 1884. Wilde was a leader of the Aesthetic Movement. He became famous because of the immense success of his plays such as Lady Windemere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 but was revised in 1891 after moralistic negative reviews.

After a public scandal involving Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was sentenced to two years' hard labour in Reading Gaol for 'gross indecency'. His poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published anonymously in 1898. Wilde never lived in England again and died at the age of forty-six in Paris on 30 November 1900. He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery where admirers often leave the lipstick marks of kisses on his tomb.

Also by Oscar Wilde

Penguin Readers Level 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray (ELT Graded Reader)

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Praise for The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

[The Importance of Being Earnest] has a strong claim to being the most perfect comedy in the English language
Daily Telegraph

[The Importance of Being Earnest] remains a thing of inimitable brains and beauty; the sharpest of social satires, wrapped in the most perfect of gossamer-light romantic comedies
Scotsman

Oscar Wilde's masterpiece about political chicanery, fraud, blackmail and the hypocrisy of public figures retains an alarming currency
Express (on An Ideal Husband)