“I have finished three acts of the play for Hare, and will do the fourth in the next fortnight ….

I am going to make an effort to induce him to see that my new play is a masterpiece, but I have grave doubts.“ (letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, c. The mood that created them I could never recover.“ (letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, January – March 1897, Reading prison, ibid. The two works left then imperfect I was unable to take up again. “The moment, in the early December of the year to which I have been alluding, I had succeeded in inducing your mother to send you out of England, I collected again the torn and ravelled web of my imagination, got my life back into my own hands, and not merely finished the three remaining acts of The Ideal Husband, but conceived and had almost completed two other plays of a completely different type, the Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane, when suddenly, unbidden, unwelcome, and under circumstances fatal to my happiness you returned. “Dear Stuart, I am so sorry I am not in town but I am away in the country by the river – divided in interest between paddling a canoe and planning a comedy – and finding that life in meadow and stream is far more complex than is life in streets and salons.“ (letter to an unidentified correspondent, June 1893, Complete Letters, p.

Marshall’s typing service on the Strand.“ (Lich, p. “The writing of An Ideal Husband started in June 1893 at Goring-on-Thames and proceeded until 19 February 1894, when the final typescript was apparently completed by Mrs. Acting rights in America owned by Charles Frohman, Empire Theatre, New York.įirst published in book form by Leonard Smithers, London, July 1899.

La Sainte Courtisane, or, The Woman Covered with Jewelsįirst produced by Lewis Waller at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, 3 January 1895.įirst US production by Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum, New York, March 12, 1895.

Libraries, Collections and Collectors, Auctioneers and Dealers.

Missing Manuscripts and Unknown Locations.

The Library of Edward Dean Richmond, November 1933.

A Prominent Pennsylvania Collector, April and December 1924.

A Noted Philadelphia Collector (Colonel H.

Stuart Mason, Art and Morality (1907) and Bibliography (1914).

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde