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.