The play was well received by the public, running from April to August 1893 – considered a good run for its time[n 1] – but received mixed reviews. The reviewer in The Theatre thought it "Not a play, but a stodge of Wilde, leavened by a pinch of human nature", redeemed only by superb acting that "performs a miracle and provides compensation well-nigh sufficient for the disappointments of the play".[25] The Era said, "If Lady Windermere's Fan showed us Mr Oscar Wilde as a playwright at his best, A Woman of No Importance exhibits all the vices of his method with irritating clearness".[26] The Pall Mall Gazette complained of "much want of originality in matter, and some want of originality in manner", but thought it "a play with many strong situations, with much – indeed with too much – amusing dialogue".[27] The Times commented:
Overweighted though it may be with dialogue, according to the accepted formulas, the play is fresh in idea and execution and is written moreover with a literary polish too rare on the English stage. … Cleverly written as it is, the play would gain by compression alike in its flippant and its serious passages.[28]Reviewing the play in 1934, W. B. Yeats quoted Walter Pater's comment that Wilde "wrote like an excellent talker"; Yeats agreed and found the verbal wit delightful, but the drama falling back on popular stage conventions.[29] Reviewing a 1953 production, J. C. Trewin wrote, "This revival proved once more that Wilde wrote one sustained play and one only: The Importance of Being Earnest. Nothing else, I fear, matters".[17] Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann has described A Woman of No Importance as the "weakest of the plays Wilde wrote in the Nineties".[30] After a 1991 revival, The Times called the play "as fatuous a melodrama as ever eminent playwright penned".[18] In 1997, Wilde's biographer Peter Raby commented:
There is something Chekhovian in this study of England, which exposes the immorality and hypocrisy, and the immense self-satisfaction, of the English ruling classes, and which yet contrives to show glimpses of the charm and elegance, the allure, of a way of life which has no future. The play has an autumnal feel, with its leitmotifs of Shetland shawls and mufflers; and the single white glove of the ageing aristocratic dandy provides an appropriate final image.[31]
