Bernard Shaw

Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views. In Shaw's hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in...

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Classic includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader appreciate Shaw's wit and cynicism. In this delightful romance about the man too self-centered to fall in love and the woman too unsure of herself to want more out of life than the little she already has, George Bernard Shaw shakes the dust off the Cinderella story and tells it as only he can. Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl who...

Annotation

Outside Covent Garden on a rainy evening in 1912, cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, meets linguistic expert Henry Higgins. Higgins, in turn, bets with his companion, Colonel Pickering, that, within six months, he could transform Eliza into a proper lady, simply by teaching her proper English. The next morning, face and hands freshly scrubbed, Eliza presents herself on Higgins' doorstep, ready and willing to be turned into a lady.