ABSTRACT
Eighty years after the publication of Emma in 1815, another comic masterwork was produced, Oscar Wilde's most popular play, The Importance of Being Earnest. It is not to be wondered at that many of Jane Austen's devotees are also admirers of Wilde's comedy. Wilde's comedy, a triumph of wit, also has much in common with Austen's language of irony and her comic trajectories. Themes common to both works include social hypocrisy, the nature of marriage, the proper upbringing of young women, the "natural" superiority of the English over the French, questions of inheritance, the nature of a true gentleman, and debates about the proper role of the church in society, of the imagination, and of writers of novels. In the happy ending of Emma, despite the class rigidity that offends our contemporary democratic spirit and despite the heroine's reliance on her hero which offends our contemporary feminism, we are given a vision of moral, social, and spiritual wholeness.
