Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw (1913)
“A phonetics professor bets he can pass a Cockney flower girl off as a duchess — and discovers that creating a new person is easier than taking responsibility for her.”
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Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen
The structural ancestor of Pygmalion's ending — Nora's departure is Eliza's departure, one generation earlier and one medium further north
Wilde satirizes the same class system Shaw attacks, but with wit as decoration rather than weapon — the velvet glove to Shaw's iron fist
Educating Rita
Willy Russell
A direct descendant of Pygmalion — working-class woman transformed by education, with the same question: who benefits from the transformation?
Major Barbara
George Bernard Shaw
Shaw's other great play about class, money, and moral compromise — the companion piece to Pygmalion's argument about poverty and respectability
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
Another study of class performance and emotional repression — Stevens the butler is Higgins's spiritual descendant, performing dignity while missing life
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
The other great 'creation' myth in English literature — a creator who refuses responsibility for what he has made, with catastrophic consequences