Lady Windermere's Fan, By Oscar Wilde

SUMMARY

ACT I

It’s Margaret Windermere’s birthday, and she’s having a party tonight. Her husband has given a fan as a birthday present. Lord Darlington, a friend of the couple, is visiting lady Windermere and is paying her a lot of compliments. He is infatuated with her, but we don’t know if he’s really in love, or he’s only a rake. Lord Darlington knows lord Windermere has a singular relation with a woman called Mrs Erlynne, who is new in the city, and wants to take advantage of this in order to seduce lady Windermere.

Lady Windermere is going to find out about her husband supposed affair through the Duchess of Berwick, who tells her about the frequent visits her husband pays to Mrs Erlynne, hinting he has a love affair with her.

Lady Windermere doesn’t believe the story, but she has some doubts. In the end, she checks her husband bank books and discovers he has repeatedly given big sums of money to Mrs Erlynne.

She asks her husband why he has given her so much money, but he didn’t explain why; he only asks her to trust him and also to invite Mrs Erlynne to her birthday party. As she doesn’t want to do it, Lord Windermere writes himself the invitation card.

ACT 2

In the second act, we are at Lady Windermere birthday party. There are a lot of people, including Lord Windermere’s funny friends, Lord Darlington, the Duchess of Berwick and Mrs Erlynne. In the beginning, all the people want to avoid Mrs Erlynne, but, as the party goes on, everybody is seduced by her wits. Even one of Lord Windermere’s friends, Lord Augustus, aka Tuppy, a very simple man, falls in love with her.

Lady Windermere is so angry and disappointed with her husband, that she decides to accept Lord Darlington’s love and his proposition to elope with her. When the party is over, she leaves a letter for her husband telling him she is leaving him and goes away to Lord Darlington’s house. But Mrs Erlynne sees the letter, takes it before Lord Windermere knows anything about its content, and decides to save her and her marriage.

ACT 3

Lady Windermere is at Lord Darlington’s house waiting for him to run away together. But she has some doubts about her decision. After a while, in comes Mrs Erlynne. She tells her she wants to save her and her family, and lastly, she persuades her to go back to her husband. But, when they are going to go out, Lord Darlington and his friends, including Lord Windermere, are entering the house. Mrs Erlynne and Lady Windermere have to hide quickly.

But somebody finds Lady Windermere’s fan on a chair, and, when Lord Windermere is on the point of starting searching for his wife thinking she has something to do with Lord Darlington, Mrs Erlynne reveals herself. Everybody is astounded, Lady Windermere can make her escape, and Lord Augustus is quite disappointed.

ACT 4

Lady Windermere is at home thinking about the way to thank Mrs Erlynne, now she knows she isn’t a bad woman because she helped her to go back to her husband. But now her husband tells her she’s a contemptible woman.

At that moment, Mrs Erlynne comes to Lord Windermere’s to give back Lady Windermere’s fan and to ask for a photo of hers. While she is looking for it, and Lord Windermere and Mrs Erlynne are alone together, we find out that Mrs Erlynne is Lady Windermere’s mother, and that she abandoned her daughter twenty years ago to elope with her lover, who died some years after and left her alone in the world and rejected by every society. But neither he nor she tells anything of this secret to Lady Windermere.

In the end, Mrs Erlynne goes away, but not without finding a creditable explanation for her appearance at Lord Darlington’s, and this way she gets back Tuppy, and they leave for the continent together.

AUDIOBOOK

A Good Woman FILM

Lady Windermere's Fan FILM

Another Lady Windermere's Fan FILM

The Executor, by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark at the Wikipedia: click here

The Executor: review

Interview: click here

Some summaries of her works: click here

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

The driver's seat

MURIEL SPARK

Muriel Spark was born in 1918 in Edinburgh.

She had some education but she didn’t go to university. She worked as a secretary in a department store.

When she was 19 she got engaged to Sidney Spark, 13 years older than herself and together they went to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where they got married.

When she was 20 she had a son and soon after she discovered her husband was maniac depressive. They put their son in a convent school, and she left her husband and went back to Great Britain, where she worked for the secret service during the WWII. She only took care of her son sending him some money regularly, so when he went to England he was brought up by his grandparents in Scotland.

Muriel lived in London, New York and finally, when she was 50, near Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine. Together they settled in Tuscany, where they lived ever after. Some people believe they were lesbians, but all their friends and themselves always denied it.

Muriel died in 2006, when she was 88, and she left all her properties to Penelope, and nothing to her son. She had a strained relationship with him, because he decided to be a practicing orthodox Jewish, as his grandfather was a Jewish. But Muriel, who was brought up in the Presbyterian religion, converted to Catholicism when she began to write: she said religion was important to understand the human nature, and so for her writings.

She started to write during the WWII and she published her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. The novel dealt with the conversion to another religion.

Her most wellknown novel is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published when she was 43. The star of the novel is a young teacher with different and new ideas about pedagogy, but working in a traditional school. There she has a group of six or seven girls that are her faithful pupils. The style is innovating because the narrative has a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, and doesn’t follow a straight time line.

Other novels of hers are Robinson, Mememto Mori and Mandelbaum Gate. As you can imagine from the title, Robinson deals with three people stranded in a desert island after a plane accident. Mememto Mori is a kind of thriller where a circle of old people got recurrently an anonymous call with the mysterious message “remember you must die”; the question is to discover who phones these people and why. Mandelbaun Gate is situated in Israel at the moment of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem and in an almost war situation between the Arabic world and Israel; the protagonist is a woman who’s looking for her boyfriend, an archaeologist working in Qumran.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The driver's seat were made into films.

Muriel Spark also wrote several short stories and essays.

THE EXECUTOR

The Executor has something of autobiographic, as Muriel Spark left all her literary material (like manuscripts and diaries) to a Scottish university at her death. In our story, a famous writer does a similar thing (and he’s also Scottish, like Muriel Spark).  There always has been a debate about using the life of one’s own to produce a literary artefact; some people are all the time looking for autobiographic elements in a work in a kind of morbid curiosity, and some other people can despise a work only for having these elements. I think that nobody can get rid of their own life, so it is almost impossible that it doesn’t impregnate all we do, all we make. I think the question is another one: is the writer’s life useful to make literary their work, or does the writer only want to tell us their life (which can be interesting or not)? In our case, our authoress makes profit of a life purpose of hers to create a short story, but with so much art that, although we know there is something of her life in there, we forget it almost immediately because the story takes us beyond the anecdote and very far away from it.

Susan Kyle is appointed executor of the literary work of a famous Scottish author. According to his last orders, she gives everything to an institution. But not exactly everything, because she cheats the institution keeping a manuscript of an unfinished novel (in order to finish it herself?, in order to sell it afterwards at a very high price?, for mere whim?). But somebody (or a ghost) knows about her doings and send intimidating messages to her on the manuscript about the novel and even about her private life. Is she going to finish the story herself? Is she going to destroy the manuscript and thus to get free from her persecutor or the spirit? Is she going to give it to the institution, at last? Are we going to know the end of the manuscript narrative? So read the story: I’m not going to be a spoiler!

QUESTIONS
 
What is Librium?
Explain the proverb “Still waters run deep” in the context.
Tell us something about Brueghel the Elder.
According to the writer himself, he was “a speck in the horizon” in the painting of modern literature. What did he want to mean?
 
Talk about the characters:
 

The writer

The narrator

The people from university

Elaine

Mrs Donalson

Jamie

Greta

 
Who are these and why are they mentioned?
 

Angus Wilson

Saul Bellow

Mary Whitelaw

Jonathan Brown

Mrs Thatcher

 
Where are the Pentland Hills?
What is the meaning of this expression: “I’m not the one to let the grass grow under my feet”?
What is the meaning of this phrase in context: “even though is only Nature”?
In the context, what is the problem with the words “lunch” and “dinner”?
What happens with the unfinished manuscript?
Summarize the unfinished novel.
How does the unfinished novel end?
What do you think is the meaning of the last inscription by the uncle’s handwriting?
 
VOCABULARY

die out, heading (n), shroud, filing (v), sheaf, sideboard, snoot, have somebody on, stoke, manse