The Importance of Being Earnest
Two young men invent imaginary relatives so they can leave the country when they like, and their deceptions collide in a London drawing room. Wilde's play is built almost entirely out of paradoxes, and it is still the funniest comedy in English.
The plot is trivial and the dialogue is not: every character speaks in epigrams, and the effect is a society in which nobody means what they say. Wilde keeps the targets specific: marriage, class, respectability, the moral seriousness of the Victorian establishment. Read it aloud if possible.
Public-domain status
First published in 1895. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Oscar Wilde died in 1900, so this work has been free to republish there since 1971.
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