Both were talented artists with strong ideas about their art.

Īlexander was a meticulous manager and he and Wilde began exhaustive revisions and rehearsals of the play. Wilde, impressed by his confidence, opted to take a percentage instead, from which he would earn £7,000 in the first year alone (worth £809,900 today).

Alexander liked the play, and offered him an advance of £1,000 for it. Wilde began writing the play at the prodding of George Alexander, the actor manager of St James's Theatre.

Numerous characters in the play appear to draw their names from the north of England: Lady Windermere from the lake and nearby town Windermere (though Wilde had used 'Windermere' earlier in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime), the Duchess of Berwick from Berwick-upon-Tweed, Lord Darlington from Darlington. He went to the Lake District in the north of England, where he stayed with a friend and later met Robert Ross. Unperturbed, he decided to write another play but turned from tragedy to comedy. Mrs Erlynne sacrifices herself and her reputation to save her daughter's marriage.īy the summer of 1891 Wilde had already written three plays: Vera or, The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua had found little success, and Salome had yet to be staged. It is then revealed that Mrs Erlynne is Lady Windermere's mother, who abandoned her family twenty years before the time the play is set. After discovering what has transpired, Mrs Erlynne follows Lady Windermere and attempts to persuade her to return to her husband and in the course of this, Mrs Erlynne is discovered in a compromising position. Angered by her husband's supposed unfaithfulness, Lady Windermere decides to leave her husband for another lover. Although he denies it, he invites the other woman, Mrs Erlynne, to his wife's birthday ball.

The story concerns Lady Windermere, who suspects that her husband is having an affair with another woman she confronts him with it. Lady Windermere's Fan, A Play About a Good Woman is a four-act comedy by Oscar Wilde, first performed on Saturday, 20 February 1892, at the St James's Theatre in London. Vincent (Lord Augustus Lorton) and George Alexander (Lord Windermere) 1892 premiere: left to right, Ben Webster (Cecil Graham), Nutcombe Gould (Lord Darlington), Adolphus Vane-Tempest (Charles Dumby), H.

Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde