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Books Like The Importance of Being Earnest
Best books to read after The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Readers who love The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde are drawn to its combination of perfect wit, devastating social comedy, and the critique of Victorian society concealed behind an exquisite surface of artifice — they want plays and novels that deploy comedy as a critique of social hypocrisy, organized around characters performing their class roles with magnificent absurdity.
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An Ideal Husband
by Oscar Wilde
The companion social comedy — Sir Robert Chiltern's political career threatened by Mrs. Cheveley's blackmail. Ran simultaneously with The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895; is Wilde's most politically serious play, asking the same questions about Victorian hypocrisy but with genuine stakes rather than pure comic mechanism
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Pygmalion
by George Bernard Shaw
Shaw's companion in the tradition of the British play that makes social comedy do philosophical work — Higgins and Eliza, the English class system as a system of language and performance. Both are companion critiques of the English class system: Wilde's through pure wit and artifice; Shaw's through the social experiment of transformation
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The companion Wilde work — Dorian's portrait, his corruption, and his end. The two pillars of Wilde's achievement: the novel shows the dark side of the Wildean aesthetic project (the portrait makes literal what the wit conceals); the play shows the perfect surface that conceals it
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Lady Windermere's Fan
by Oscar Wilde
The earlier social comedy — Lady Windermere's discovery of what her husband has been doing with Mrs. Erlynne. Both are companion explorations of Victorian social hypocrisy: the earlier play takes it seriously; Earnest converts it into the material of pure comedy
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The Rivals
by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The eighteenth-century precursor in the tradition of the English comedy of manners — Captain Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, and the romantic complications of Bath. The two great peaks of the English comic tradition: both organized around romantic complications, misunderstandings about identity, and a social world whose conventions are simultaneously the source of the comedy and its target
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Austen's companion in the tradition of the literary investigation of the English class system as a system of social performance — Elizabeth Bennet, Darcy, and the marriage market. Both The Importance of Being Earnest and Pride and Prejudice are organized around the relationship between wit, intelligence, and social convention in a world organized to reward performance rather than essence
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De Profundis
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's long letter from Reading Gaol — his account of his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, his downfall, and his spiritual reckoning. The dark companion to The Importance of Being Earnest: where the play is the perfect surface of Wildean wit, the letter is the reality that the surface conceals
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The Importance of Being Earnest (film, 1952)
by Anthony Asquith
Asquith's 1952 film adaptation starring Michael Redgrave, Michael Denison, Edith Evans, and Dorothy Tutin is the definitive screen version — Evans's Lady Bracknell is one of the great film performances. Essential companion to the text for understanding how the play works in performance: the comedy depends on the contrast between the seriousness with which the characters take their absurd positions and the absurdity of those positions
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