The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde is a celebrated collection featuring Wilde’s masterful comedic works, with the titular play—a sharp-witted farce from 1895—satirizing Victorian society’s obsession with appearances, marriage, and earnestness through the escapades of Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, who invent fictional identities to dodge social duties and pursue love interests fixated on the name Ernest. The anthology often includes kindred society comedies like Lady Windermere’s Fan, which skewers upper-class hypocrisies via a scandalous fan intrigue; A Woman of No Importance, exposing moral double standards through a witty outcast’s revelations; and An Ideal Husband, where political blackmail tests integrity amid glamorous deceit. Together, these plays showcase Wilde’s epigrammatic brilliance, trivializing serious norms to revel in absurdity and delight audiences with their enduring critique of decorum’s hollow core.