Review: Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde

 

When I read The Picture of Dorian Gray a couple years ago, I fell in love with his writing style. The story also gripped me and kept my attention. I have had all of his works on my TBR since and my oldest daughter had to read The Importance of Being Earnest for her Lit and Comp class this year and it being Oscar Wilde, I was so excited. She loved the play and I ended up checking out the Penguin Classic of The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. This play is the first in the book. I am listening to them on audio, so I can count them separately for my Goodreads goal. 

At first the audio was very jarring because it is a full cast and then I realized that all of the character names and movements and stage positions were not going to be read. So I had to quickly read thos or not at all and I had to pay attention to the character names because it was difficult to know who was who. Besides all that I did end up giving this a 5 star. It was funny and so freaking dramatic.... obviously.

The play starts off with Lady Windermere getting visited by a Lord Darlington who is sweet talking her and saying that he will be her friend if needed. She then gets a visit by the Duchess of Berwick who is a freaking gossip. She informs Lady Windermere that her husband has been seen in London with a woman who has been cast out of society. Lady Windermere then goes through her husbands desk and find a bank book where she discovers that he has been giving this Mrs Erlynne random sums of money.

She then confronts her husband who then has the nerve to demand that his wife invite this Mrs Erlynne to Lady Windermere's ball that evening. She then threatens that if Mrs Erlynne shows up, then she will get a smack across the face with her fan.

There are a handful of other male characters who kind of don't matter and they talk about trivial things and basically be men who talk down upon women and call them crazy and that Mrs Erlynne is wonderful. 

In 70 pages Oscar Wilde managed to portray aristocratic society in such a ingenius way.