Pygmalion both delighted & scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion who falls in love with his perfect female statue it is also a barbed attack on the British class system & 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.