AN IDEAL HUSBAND

By the Author of Lady Windermere's Fan. London: Leonard Smithers and Co., 1899. Original mauve cloth decorated in gilt. First Edition, consisting of 1000 regular copies (so stated; there were also 100 signed copies on Van Gelder paper, plus twelve signed copies on Japan vellum). This was the fourth and last of Wilde's four great comedies of manners -- following LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN (published in 1893), A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (1894) and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1899, five months earlier). "An Ideal Husband" had opened at the Theatre Royal on 3 January 1895 (the actors had been quite annoyed that Wilde required them to rehearse on Christmas Day, only to keep them waiting for him to appear). It was an immediate success, but it was while "Earnest" and "Husband" were running that Wilde inadvisably filed suit against the Marquess of Queensberry (father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas), for criminal libel; this quickly morphed into a charge of "gross indecency" against Wilde, and when he was arrested in April, his plays closed. Sentenced to two years' hard labour (1895-1897), upon his release he fled to France -- where he resided when this book was published. The artistic binding design is by Charles Shannon. This is a very good copy, of a book that is difficult to find in any better condition: the spine is rather dull, and there is moderate cover soil. Mason 385. Provenance: the front endpaper bears the signature "Wilmer C. France | 1899". The pioneering female classicist Emily Wilmer Cave France (1868-1951, married name Wright after 1906) was born in Birmingham England and educated first at Girton College (Cambridge), then at the University of Chicago -- where she was a Fellow in Latin and in Greek while earning her Ph.D.; from 1897 until her retirement in 1933 (which span includes the date this book was published), she was a Professor in Greek at Bryn Mawr College. In 2022 the Cambridge Philological Society published a monograph by D.N. Greenwood about her, "Steely-Eyed Athena: Wilmer Cave Wright and the Advent of Female Classicists.". …