Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts (English, Paperback, George Bernard Shaw)

Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle – an east-end young woman with an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers – for Mrs Patrick Campbell, with whom he had a passionate but unconsummated affair.
From the outset the play was a sensational success, although Shaw, irritated by its popularity at the expense of his artistic intentions, dismissed it as a potboiler. And to thwart those productions that hinted that Higgins and Eliza would marry he wrote a short-story epilogue with a bitter-sweet ending.
The Pygmalion of legend falls in love with his perfect female statue and persuades Venus to bring her to life so that he can marry her. But Shaw radically reworks Ovid’s tale to give it a ‘feminist’ slant: while Higgins teaches Eliza to speak and act like a duchess, she also asserts her independence, adamantly refusing to be his creation.
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