Leila’s Reviews > Lady Windermere's Fan > Status Update

This is a good one for the “bring back yearning” crowd

“‘I want you to take my husband with you. He has been so attentive lately that he has become a perfect nuisance. Now this woman is just the thing for him. He’ll dance attendance upon her as long as she lets him and won’t bother me. I assure you, women of that kind are most useful. They form the basis of other peoples’ marriages’”

Wait no not a mistress I think

What do you mean Oscar Wilde has a play I’ve never heard of where a man begs his wife to invite his mistress to her birthday party with an appeal to female empowerment and lamentation on the undue burden of perceived purity on women in polite society?

“‘Dear Margaret, you are not going to cry.’
‘You needn’t be afraid Duchess. I never cry.’
‘That’s quite right dear. Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones’”

“‘Because I think life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it’”

“‘Do you know, I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad - people are either charming or tedious. I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can’t help belonging to them’”

“‘You look on me as being behind the age. Well I am! I should be sorry to be on the same level as an age like this’
‘You think the age very bad?’
‘Yes. Nowadays, people seem to look on life as a speculation. It is not a speculation, it is a sacrament. Its ideal is love, its purification is sacrifice’”

“‘Besides, there is this to be said. If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism’”