The phoneticist Henry Higgins makes a wager that he can take Eliza Doolittle — a cockney flower girl who sells blooms on the street — and pass her off as a duchess in polite society. What he fails to account for is that his so-called ‘creation’ has a mind entirely her own. ‘Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf . . . you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba’ Both delighted and scandalized audiences when it first appeared in 1914, Pygmalion is a brilliantly witty reimagining of the classical story of a sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue. In Shaw’s hands, it becomes something sharper: a barbed assault on the British class system and a bold expression of his feminist convictions. With an Introduction by NICHOLAS GRENE
ISBN 13: 9780141439501
Author: George Bernard Shaw
