At a lavish house party in the English countryside, the witty and wicked Lord Illingworth offers young Gerald Arbuthnot the opportunity of a lifetime: a position as his private secretary, promising wealth and status. But Gerald's mother, the respectable Mrs. Arbuthnot, is horrified. She knows a secret that could destroy them all—for Lord Illingworth is not a stranger, but the man who abandoned her twenty years ago, leaving her to raise their illegitimate son alone .
As Wilde's sharpest epigrams cut through the drawing-room chatter, a darker truth emerges. In a world where a man's sins are forgiven and a woman's are never forgotten, Mrs. Arbuthnot must choose: reveal the past and shatter her son's future, or remain silent and lose him forever .
Oscar Wilde's blistering satire on Victorian hypocrisy explores the double standard that made one person's shame another's amusement—and asks who, in the end, is truly a woman of no importance.
