Pygmalion

About this book

One rainy night in Covent Garden, the phonetics professor Henry Higgins boasts to Colonel Pickering that he could pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a duchess within six months just by teaching her to speak. Eliza takes him at his word and arrives for lessons, and what begins as a wager becomes a sharp comedy about class, language and a woman who refuses to be anyone's creation.

Context and significance

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Irish playwright and critic, wrote Pygmalion in 1912, naming it after the sculptor in Greek myth who fell in love with his statue. He insisted the play should not end in romance. Its musical version, My Fair Lady, became world famous, and Shaw remains one of the few people to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.

About the author