I remember really enjoying The Importance of Being Earnest on stage when I was a lot younger. I still enjoyed reading it but not as much. Lady Windermere's Fan was OK as was The Ideal Husband. I could not even finish Salome. Except for the description of the historical context of the play and the notes, most of the supplemental materials were a waste of paper.

I liked this book. It made me laugh for all the ridiculousness of what the Earnest believed in those times. But it was an interesting book with a pleasant ending.

Hillarious and unexpectedly moral

One of my all-time favorites! I could read or watch this again right now. So witty, clever and fun.

It breaks down like this:

Lady Windermere's Fan: 3 stars
An Ideal Husband: 4 stars
The Importance of Being Earnest: 5 stars

That's the chronological order in which Wilde wrote them and the order in which I recommend reading them. It actually made me kind of giddy to read all three in just over a week and see how Wilde's playwriting improved by an order of magnitude with each play. Lady Windermere is a rather silly melodrama with some of Wilde's funniest lines lightly sprinkled throughout; An Ideal Husband, a much sharper and funnier play, still has a tendency to spell out Wilde's themes through long, dramatic monologues. Wilde had a serious axe to grind against the perils of rigid Victorian morality, and his convictions get the best of him in these often heavy-handed plays.

But then, at last, we come to the funniest thing ever written for the stage. The Importance of Being Earnest is just pure, light, gleeful farce from start to finish. The plot is clever but completely inconsequential—something about marriage schemes, mistaken identities, and snooty relatives—which allows Wilde's characters to focus on the really important things in life, like eating cucumber sandwiches and saying witty lines like this:

"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean laundry in public."

Or bizarre ones like this:

"One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

This is one of the only great works of literature ever to be built entirely around good jokes and surface charm. I don't know of any other author, with the possible exception of P.G. Wodehouse, who can write so elegantly about nothing in particular.

Salomé ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Lady Windermere’s Fan⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Importance of Being Earnest ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Overall it was very entertaining and I have lines to quote for days.

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.