Lady Windermere’s Fan is a collection of catchy aphorisms loosely embroidering a fundamentally silly story. Oscar Wilde understood that the best marketing in the theatre world is to have people quote you, and so he built an entire play around the smart set tossing out modish epigrams like baubles from a Mardi Gras float.

This was the earliest successful Wilde play and it does show some rough edges. The main character, Lady Windermere, is an unappealing puritan, an unlikely target for her besotted husband’s near self-immolation. Beyond that, there is the usual nightmare of suddenly finding oneself (metaphorically) naked on the stage, stripped bare of the trappings of respectability, reputation and decorum.

Mrs Erlynne. I suppose, Windermere, you would like me to retire into a convent, or become a hospital nurse, or something of that kind, as people do in silly modern novels. That is stupid of you, Arthur; in real life we don’t do such things. – Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde (1892)

One thing I did find curious, and I do not know if it is pure coincidence. Recently, I read another play about a daughter threatened by the sudden appearance of an unrespectable mother. That was G B Shaw’s 1893 Mrs Warren’s Profession. Could Wilde and Shaw have shared an idea, or was there a spate of plays on that topic around 1892-1893?