Staged in 1893 when Wilde had already achieved fame wealth & notoriety A Woman of No Importance was another attempt to fuse comedy of manners with high melodrama. Gerald Arbuthnot is a young man on the make with an American heiress & the post of secretary to the brilliant but dissolute Lord Illingworth within his reach. When he asks his mother to celebrate with them it turns out that Illingworth is Gerald's father who seduced & abandoned his mother twenty years earlier. Loyalty weighs heavier than ambition & Gerald declines the association with Illingworth. This edition which also analyses Wilde's various drafts & revisions of the play argues that the playwright here continued to explore the rivalry between an older man & woman for the affection of a beautiful young man.