Manyebook

Pygmalion

'Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf ... you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba'

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 polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his 'creation' has a mind of her own.

With an Introduction by NICHOLAS GRENE

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 144
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 978-0-14-143950-1
  • EAN
  • 9780141439501
  • Release date
  • 2003