ЖЕНЩИНА БЕЗ ЗНАЧЕНИЯ

A glittering English country house, a witty London society, and a single buried secret that will tear the whole gleaming surface apart. At Lady Hunstanton's elegant country house in the English shires, the cream of late Victorian society has gathered for a weekend of conversation, tennis, and high-style social maneuvering. Among the guests is Lord Illingworth, the most fashionable cynic of his generation, whose epigrams have cut through every drawing room in London. Also present is a young American puritan named Hester Worsley, a quiet and earnest mother named Mrs. Arbuthnot, and her promising young son Gerald — for whom Lord Illingworth has just offered a coveted position as private secretary. The arrangement seems perfect for everyone. It is not. Mrs. Arbuthnot has a reason — long buried, carefully hidden, never spoken — for refusing to let her son enter Lord Illingworth's service, and as the play unfolds, that reason rises with quiet, devastating inevitability through layers of polished social comedy until it stands at the center of the stage and demands to be heard. Oscar Wilde's third society play is one of his most carefully constructed and morally serious works — a comedy of glittering surfaces wrapped around a hidden core of genuine pain. The first acts deliver some of the most brilliant comic dialogue in the English theatrical canon: Lord Illingworth's epigrams alone would secure the play a permanent place in the repertoire. But Wilde uses that brilliance to build a trap, and when the trap closes around his characters in the final acts, the play reveals itself as a sustained moral argument about the double standards Victorian society applied to men and women, about the long shadow of past actions, and about the meaning of decency in a world that has agreed to call the wrong things important. A Woman of No Importance is essential reading for anyone interested in classic English drama, late Victorian society, the wit of Oscar Wilde, or the long literary argument over who pays the cost of social hypocrisy. This edition presents the complete, unabridged text of one of Wilde's four major society plays.