Lady Windermere's Fan

On her twenty-first birthday, Lady Windermere hears that her husband is paying large sums to Mrs Erlynne, a woman with a notorious past. When he insists on inviting Mrs Erlynne to that night's ball, his wife swears she will strike her across the face with the fan he has just given her. When the guest arrives, she lets the fan fall and only bows coldly.

Humiliated, and certain her marriage is over, Lady Windermere decides to accept Lord Darlington's love and goes to his rooms, leaving a letter for her husband. Mrs Erlynne finds the letter and follows her. She is Lady Windermere's mother, who left her own husband and baby twenty years before, and Lord Windermere has been paying her to keep that secret. She persuades her daughter to go home, but the men arrive from their club and the fan is found on the sofa. Mrs Erlynne steps out of hiding and claims it as her own, giving up her reputation so that her daughter can slip away.

Next morning Mrs Erlynne returns the fan, keeps her secret and asks Lady Windermere to keep hers. She leaves for a life abroad, engaged to Lord Augustus Lorton and carrying the fan. Lady Windermere, who once divided women into the good and the bad, ends the play calling her 'a very good woman'.

Key themes

• Good and bad women
• A mother's sacrifice
• Secrets and silence
• Scandal and society
• The fan
• Marriage and money

Lady Windermere's Fan was Oscar Wilde's first society comedy. It was first performed at the St James's Theatre, London, on 20 February 1892, produced by George Alexander, who also played Lord Windermere. At the first night Wilde made a curtain speech, and he was criticised for appearing smoking a cigarette.

The play is subtitled 'A Play About a Good Woman', a phrase that leaves the audience to decide which of its women deserves it. It was published in 1893 by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and the printed text is dedicated to the memory of Robert, Earl of Lytton.

Wilde sets the action in the London of his own day and confines it to twenty-four hours, from five o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon to half-past one the next day, in two rooms of the Windermeres' house and in Lord Darlington's rooms. The plot draws on the machinery of melodrama, with a lost mother, a letter, a woman hidden behind a curtain and a fan left on a sofa, but it is played out among people who talk in epigrams, above all in the men's scene of Act III.

First performed at the St James's Theatre, London, on 20 February 1892; published 1893.

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