Pygmalion

“You see this creature with her kerbstone English… Well sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess…”

So begins Henry Higgins’ linguistic project to transform Eliza Dolittle’s speech. But he hadn’t bargained on Eliza’s feisty character or falling in love with her…
(back cover)

QUOTES FROM PYGMALION
“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”
“If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama. Over the course of his life, he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his plays address prevailing social problems, but each also includes a vein of comedy that makes their stark themes more palatable. In these works, Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.

He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). The former for his contributions to literature and the latter for his work on the film “Pygmalion” (an adaptation of his play of the same name). Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright, as he had no desire for public honors, but he accepted it at his wife’s behest. She considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books to English.