Five-minute digest
The Importance of Being Earnest
Summary
The Importance of Being Earnest, subtitled 'A Trivial Comedy for Serious People', is Oscar Wilde's last and most famous play, a farce of mistaken identities and witty epigrams. In the first act, in his London flat, the idle young Algernon Moncrieff discovers that his friend, whom he knows as Ernest Worthing, is really Jack Worthing, a respectable country gentleman who invented a wicked younger brother named Ernest so that he could escape to town. Algernon confesses that he too has an invented friend, the invalid Bunbury, whose illnesses let him escape dull dinners; he calls this 'Bunburying'. Jack is in love with Algernon's cousin Gwendolen Fairfax, who returns his love chiefly because she believes his name is Ernest, a name she says inspires absolute confidence. When Jack proposes, Gwendolen's formidable mother, Lady Bracknell, interviews him and is appalled to learn that he was found as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station; she forbids the match. In the second act, at Jack's country house, Algernon arrives pretending to be the wicked brother Ernest and falls in love with Jack's young ward, Cecily Cardew, who has long been engaged to 'Ernest' in her imagination and diary. Jack arrives in mourning to announce Ernest's death. Gwendolen arrives too, and the two young women, each believing herself engaged to Ernest, quarrel over tea and cake, until the men's deceptions are exposed. Both men plan to be christened Ernest. In the third act Lady Bracknell arrives; Cecily's fortune softens her. Then the governess Miss Prism is recognized as the nurse who, twenty-eight years earlier, left a baby in a handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station and placed her three-volume novel in the pram. Jack turns out to be Algernon's elder brother, christened Ernest. He has been telling the truth all along. The play satirizes Victorian marriage, class and earnestness itself, and Wilde's dialogue is full of brilliant paradoxes. Its moral seriousness lies in its comic exposure of hypocrisy, vanity and double lives.
Top Lessons
The double life
Jack and Algernon live double lives for convenience; the comedy shows how lies multiply.
Satire of society
Lady Bracknell judges suitors by money and birth. Wilde exposes the shallowness of such values.
Words and truth
The play's wit turns on paradox and wordplay; it asks whether style matters more than sincerity.
Verified Quotes
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.”
Medical Lens
Bunbury's invented illnesses parody Victorian invalidism.
- Act I
Algernon describes his invalid friend Bunbury.