The plot of the existing segment is as follows: Myrrhina is an Alexandrian noblewoman who travels to the mountains to tempt Honorius, a Christian hermit, away from goodness with her beauty and wealth.
The fragments were first published in 1908 in Methuen's Collected Works, along with an introduction by Robbie Ross which explained its intervening history: "At the time of Wilde’s trial the nearly completed drama was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore it to the author.
[11] Severi has compared the exploration of the spiritual and sensual life to a similar thread running throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome and The Fisherman and his Soul, identifying it as part of "Wilde’s Parisian, Symbolist phase": "La Sainte Courtisane is neither a comedy nor a parody.
It contains all the elements of the Symbolist Mystery play: symbolic characters that embody ethical, philosophical, spiritual ideas; one main action (drama) that unfolds in three macro-sequences or tableaux and around which the whole play revolves, in some unidentified space (the desert) and time (a timeless past); highly metaphoric, repetitive language that reverberates in the rhythmic dialogue like a music of words or, as Wilde had said of the language of Salomé, like the sound of a pearl that falls on a silver basin.
"[12] Christopher S. Nassaar described the play as "a minor jeux d’esprit",[13] and places it in context as a "bridge" between Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest.