Lady Windermere's Fan

The Sunday Times reported that on the first night of Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Wilde appeared on stage after the final curtain call and told the audience how pleased he was that they evidently liked the piece as much as he did himself. The play brought him wealth and cemented his reputation for brilliant wit and devil-may-care conduct. It dramatises middle-class Victorian hypocrisy while arguing that one does well to keep a nice balance between honesty and concealment: Lady Windermere, suspecting her husband to have an affair with the experienced Mrs Erlynne, decides to leave him for the debonair Lord Darlington. In circumstances highly compromising for both, Mrs Erlynne sacrifices her reputation for Lady Windermere - an act of maternal love, for it turns out that she is Lady Windermere's mother and has been blackmailing Windermere to keep quiet about it. Lady Windermere remains innocent of the truth and her mother marries to live abroad.

Ian Small is Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of a number of critical studies on Wilde and has edited several of Wilde's works, including a scholarly edition of Wilde's second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance, also published in the New Mermaids series.