This volume contains four plays by the leading late Victorian and Edwardian playwright Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934). It provides a representative sample of the work of a writer who far outshone his rivals (including both Wilde and Shaw) in his own day, and inspired such successors as Somerset Maugham and Terence Rattigan in the genre of the 'wellmade play', and Ben Travers in the writing of farce. The plays are The Schoolmistress (1866), one of the famous Court farces; The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), the best known of all the plays about 'a woman with a past'; Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898), a much-loved backstage romance; and The Thunderbolt (1908), a pioneering social drama. Two of the plays (The Schoolmistress and The Thunderbolt), are not available in print elsewhere. This scholarly edition includes an introduction, a biographical account, a full list of Pinero's plays in performance and publication, and several important appendixes, including an alternative ending to The Schoolmistress and significant variants in the text of The Second Mrs Tanqueray.

Aubrey Tanqueray willingly withdraws from London society to marry his second wife, for Paula Ray has had a notorious past. She has all the warmth that Aubrey's first wife lacked. But in the country, ostracized by the respectable, their relationship becomes intolerably strained. Paula realises that her past will always harm those she loves. Even before Aubrey is told of Paula's suicide he curses men of his class who wreak such incalculable harm merely by leading a 'man's life'.