We all know the story of My Fair Lady from the theatre; nice to read the original play.

“galatea never does quite like pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.”



“but you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. it’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.”

independence, that middle class blasphemy!

this was my first audiobook and it went pretty well, idk if it worked for me when it didn't before because there were multiple voices? i should probably have given more than twenty minutes of a try first time around but tbf i didn't rly feel the need to.. this is super helpful now because i can't Read while working

This play was smart and hilarious. I loved the interaction between the characters and how it addressed a more serious issue while being laugh out loud funny.

After watching My Fair Lady (with Audrey Hepburn) I was unsure what I was going to think of this play. But I LOVED George Bernard Shaw's ending (ie. his sequel which is at the end of the play) - he made her a strong independent woman - demanding what she deserved and getting more than even what she asked or knew - his ending made both her character and the character of Higgins far more lovable and just seemed to make more sense to who she was as a person throughout the play -- I also just love Shaw's commentary on society at that time and women at that time in his 'sequel' - it was very well written and interesting and quite funny at times (much like his prequel at the start).

I will definitely re-read again later when I don't have Audrey on my mind and set as Liza, as I think Julia Andrews would have done a killer job in the musical version of this play as well. But again that ending not as good as this one ! (And Im a romantic at heart so that is tough for me, but I just think this version is far superior)

read for school... if shaw was alive now he would definitely be saying yass and slay

I've read the works of a number of Nobel Prize for Lit laureates: 67 of them are represented on my shelves, and with this work read, I've gotten through 50 of them. With this many out of the way, you start to get a sense of who gets picked when, where, and why, and if you think Shaw, for all his being Irish and a socialist, is a tad...tame, compared to the majority of those laureates who never spoke English or sojourned in a men's club, you wouldn't be the only one. Sure, other winners have gone for the satirical jugular, but how many of them were as extraordinarily comfortable with the highfalutin supersubtle singularity that is English comedy as this author? And yet, this text certainly has its charms without sacrificing its wit, and if you followed the arguments back to their contextual source (especially with Shaw's original play ending and 1942 afterword in hand), you'd be forgiven in thinking that there's rather a nice compromise between what was good ol' fun then and of most vital necessity now. It's about as much of a 'feminist revolution' as Ibsen's was back in the day, but considering where we were when Shaw put pen to paper and lies we tell ourselves about how far we've come today, it's worth reminding ourselves that certain kinds of progress, the real true kind, still need to be made.

Long before a thinker with the surname of Bourdieu started spouting off about a concept called habitus, folks all over were recognizing the various lingua francas of human society, especially those correlating to those hierarchies that those up top are so keen on inflicting on everyone else. I'd be surprised if Shaw were the first to have constructed a creative work using the subject as its main conceit, but this piece of his is certainly one of the better known examples in the literary world. The popularity is certainly helped by a bevy of social signifiers that tend to magnify one's influence in the "Western" part of the literate world (Nobel Prize, Oscar, one letter off from the WASP), but as someone who's dealt with more than their fair share of the classics whose intended medium is the theatre, this work isn't half bad at all. It moves along at a good pace without drowning itself in contemporaneous references, efficiently draws up extremely distinguishable characters without compromising their presentation as a complex human being, and the linguistic interplay is, of course, the highlight in its sophisticated yet still understandable conceit as setting, plot, and even character development. Even the ultra grungy nature of my 1966 library discard edition, acquired at a long ago book sale of my youth, added to the charm with a hefty dose of nostalgia, especially with the digressing yet pertinent afterword Shaw saw fit to append to the closing of the play in 1942. All in all, it was a decently entertaining jaunt with a well thought out and ultimately satisfying ending, to the point that I wouldn't mind seeing the play live. The musical and the film adaptations that hamstring the ending, though, unless I'm in so dire a need for a pick me up that my critical thinking skills are relapsing, I'm fine with passing by.

We're about a month and a half into the year of 2023, and so far, my reading has had its fair share of both welcome surprises and far from fulfilled expectations. This work certainly ended up being far more of the former than I would have imagined, and while I have no interest at the moment in Shaw's other works, it is nice to know that a self proclaimed socialist is so close to the bosom of the kyriarchy's love affair with itself. Of course, a historical figure such as this couldn't possibly make it to the 21st century without the WASP dudebros over at Wikipedia muttering darkly about "liberal fascists" and the like, and I will admit that Shaw's written takes on eugenics and Hitler are impossible to pin down one way or another given his satirical bent. But when all else fails, that's the nice thing about 'death of the author': sometimes, it really is a matter of taking what you can get and caring more about keeping the good folks alive than arguing semantics about the dead. So, I'm not about to proclaim Shaw a favorite or anything like that, but if I had to pick a white dude with both a Nobel and an Oscar to his name, he'd certainly be in my corner, wittily murmuring away.