Pygmalion is a 5-act play by George Bernard Shaw . It was written in 1912 and first produced in 1913. The plot revolves around Professor Henry Higgins’ bet with a colleague over whether he can transform a low-class flower girl, Liza Doolittle, into the equivalent of a Duchess in just 6 months. Pygmalion was a Greek mythological figure who fell in love with a sculpture he had carved and was a popular theme in Victorian drama.

Most people would be familiar with the characters Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins from the hit 1956 musical My Fair Lady , which was adapted from Pygmalion , though the plots differ in small but significant ways. In particular Shaw wanted to avoid any sense of a “happy ending” and, after viewing a performance of the play where an extra scene had been added, he wrote a sequel which definitively states what came after. The sequel was included in the published edition.