Review: The Importance of Being Earnest
A brief appreciation of Oscar Wilde’s sublime dialogue, precise language, and wonderfully cunning plot.
- Date
- May 24, 2013
- Collection
- Journal
- Reading time
- 1 min read
- Type
- Essay
- Archive status
- Written by Fiifi
From the archive: First published on May 24, 2013. Lightly edited for spelling and punctuation.
The plot was entertaining, but the writing was sublime—my God.
Oscar Wilde spared no diction in giving voice to his characters. The dialogue feels like English spoken with a delicate range of vocabulary and careful grammatical structure, without sacrificing an ounce of clarity.
It all felt very Downton Abbey-esque to me, although at the time I had not seen a single episode. I was drawing the parallel entirely from commercials and television excerpts.
And that plot: wonderfully cunning. I could imagine a friend and me trying to pull off something like it.