Society wit and a mother's buried secret
A Woman of No Importance
"Oh! no one. No one in particular. A woman of no importance."
The story in brief
SummaryLord Illingworth, the wittiest guest at Lady Hunstanton's country house, has offered to make Gerald Arbuthnot, a young bank clerk, his private secretary. Gerald is delighted: the post could let him ask Hester Worsley, a rich and outspoken young American, to marry him. Mrs Allonby teases Lord Illingworth that the Puritan Hester would never let him kiss her, and he takes it as a challenge.
When Gerald's mother arrives after dinner, Lord Illingworth recognises her. Twenty years ago, as George Harford, he refused to marry her when she was carrying his child, and Gerald is their son. Mrs Arbuthnot dare not tell Gerald the truth, and cannot stop him going. She tells him the story as if it were another girl's, and he blames the girl. Then Hester runs in, insulted by Lord Illingworth's attempt to kiss her. When Gerald swears to kill him, his mother cries out that he is Gerald's father.
Next morning Gerald demands that Lord Illingworth marry his mother. She refuses to swear love to a man she loathes, and Hester, giving up her belief that the sins of the parents should fall on the children, takes her side and offers Gerald her love. Lord Illingworth comes with offers of money and then of marriage, and is refused. When he starts to call Rachel his mistress, she strikes him with his glove. Asked later who called, she says: a man of no importance.
Key themes
"the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."
Related works
Explore more of Wilde's writing
Lady Windermere's FanA young wife suspects her husband of an affair with a woman of doubtful reputation, and one birthday ball and a forgotten fan decide everything. Wilde's first society comedy.Read more 
SaloméPrincess Salome dances for her stepfather Herod and demands the head of the prophet who refused her. A one-act tragedy, banned in London, that Wilde wrote in French.Read more 
The Importance of Being EarnestTwo young men invent imaginary people to escape their obligations, and both end up engaged under the name Ernest. Wilde's most famous play and his funniest.Read more Context
A Woman of No Importance was Wilde's second play of modern society, after Lady Windermere's Fan. It was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre, London, on 19 April 1893, in a production by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who played Lord Illingworth himself, the part that carries most of the play's epigrams.
John Lane published the play in 1894, with a dedication to Gladys, Countess de Grey. The printed text sets the action in the present day, in the Shires, and keeps it within twenty-four hours: three acts at Hunstanton Chase, a great country house, and the last in Mrs Arbuthnot's modest sitting-room at Wrockley.
The play sets the witty talk of a society comedy beside the serious story of a woman with a past. For most of the first act almost nothing happens except conversation, and the plot about Rachel Arbuthnot, George Harford and their son surfaces only in the act's last line, when Lord Illingworth tosses aside a letter in a handwriting he half remembers. From the second act on, that story takes over. The title turns on that line, and Mrs Arbuthnot answers it in the play's last words.
First performed at the Haymarket Theatre, London, on 19 April 1893; published 1894.
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