Book info

• Title Pygmalion
• Author George Bernard Shaw
• Year 1912
• Genre Play

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.

Thoughts

I’m never quite sure how to feel about reading plays, it sort of works but also I feel like you’re missing a crucial element of the whole thing. But of course, you have to start somewhere and knowing this was the basis for My Fair Lady has had me intrigued for a while. It’s a lot shorter than I expected, and I was surprised how similar it actually was - although of course the ending is vastly different and the characters slightly less fleshed out. A good read though.

Rating: 4 / 5