'Mrs. Warren's Daughter' by R.M. G explores Vivie's pursuit of a legal career, her imprisonment for a daring act, and her resilience during the war in occupied Brussels. Vivie emerges as an embodiment of suffragette strength and wartime dedication, balancing her principles with a pragmatic approach. Witness the unforgettable characters, the suffragette riots, and the German occupation, all interwoven in Vivie's transformative journey.
Vivie Warren is a well-educated young woman, with clear, dispassionate plans for her future life and career. Over the course of two days, those plans are upended as she discovers how her mother earned the fortune on which they both live. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was shocking to the audience for which George Bernard Shaw wrote it in 1893; so much so that it could not be publicly performed until 1925, with the 1902 London premiere taking place in a private club for legal reasons. Its New York premiere, in 1905, was halted by the police and the cast arrested. The London press was outraged by the 1902 performance, and in response Shaw wrote a new preface, included in this edition, furiously attacking the hypocrisy of his critics who praised plays like La Dame Aux Camélias that glamorized the lives of fashionable courtesans, but condemned his play’s attack on the sordid reality of Victorian prostitution and the poverty that drove women to it. Shaw’s delicate handling of the controversial subjects of prostitution and incest may seem tame or even prudish to a modern reader; Mrs. Warren’s profession is never even named in the course of the play. But in other respects the play is strikingly modern. Vivie’s struggle to reconcile her ethical principles with the realities of the world around her is still relevant today, and the central relationship between Mrs. Warren and her daughter is complex and nuanced as any modern psychological drama. In the end it is the strength of the characters, not the once scandalous subject matter, that makes Mrs. Warren’s Profession one of Shaw’s most enduring plays. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
One of Bernard Shaw’s early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren’s Profession places the protagonist’s decision to become a prostitute in the context of the appalling conditions for working class women in Victorian England. Faced with ill health, poverty, and marital servitude on the one hand, and opportunities for financial independence, dignity, and self-worth on the other, Kitty Warren follows her sister into a successful career in prostitution. Shaw’s fierce social criticism in this play is driven not by conventional morality, but by anger at the hypocrisy that allows society to condemn prostitution while condoning the discrimination against women that makes prostitution inevitable. This Broadview edition includes a comprehensive historical and critical introduction; extracts from Shaw’s prefaces to the play; Shaw’s expurgations of the text; early reviews of the play in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain; and contemporary contextual documents on prostitution, incest, censorship, women’s education, and the “New Woman.”
Mrs Warren's Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell are plays which give a clear sense of the range of Shaw's first forays into playwriting. Together they showcase his early negotiations between his political and social concerns and the constraints and possibilities of the British stageat the fin de siecle.These plays are bound together by shared concerns with gender roles, sexuality, concepts of familial and social duty, and how all these are shaped by wider financial, political, literary, philosophical and theatrical influences.Mrs Warren's Profession is the best known of Shaw's 'Plays Unpleasant', his first exercises in using the theatre as a means to awaken the consciences of morally complacent audiences. Written in 1893 in angry response to the success of A. W. Pinero's sensational hit The Second Mrs Tanqueray and arevival of Dumas's La dame aux camelias, Mrs Warren's Profession did not receive a public performance in Britain until 1925. Shaw's provocative response to the sentimental 'fallen woman' plays that dominated the fin-de-siecle stage was a play in which prostitution was presented not as a question offemale sexual morality, but as a direct result of the systematic economic exploitation of women.Candida (1894), by contrast, was categorised by Shaw as one of his 'Plays Pleasant', but the label was characteristically deceptive. The play appeared at first sight to offer audiences a reassuringly familiar drama of a marriage threatened by an interloper but ultimately reaffirmed when the wiferecognises her true place and her dangerous admirer is sent out into the cold. But, as critics have noted, the play was a re-working by Shaw of Ibsen's A Doll's House in which the husband played the part of the over-protected doll, unaware of the real power dynamics of his marriage.You Never Can Tell (1897) was Shaw's seaside comedy of manners, complete with an all-knowing waiter, exuberant twins, a lovelorn dentist, a long-lost father, lashings of food, and a comic catchphrase to provide the title. Shaw took all these familiar elements of Victorian farce and reworked theminto a modern play of ideas, in which etiquette and ideologies collide. Just as in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (a comparison which Shaw always stubbornly rejected), questions of class, marriage, manners, money, sex and identity underpin the plot of love-at-first-sight, mislaid parentsand reunited families.
This play revolves around Mrs. Kitty Warren, a former prostitute, and her daughter Vivie. Vivie has just graduated from the University and is visiting to get acquainted with her mother for the first time. She discovers her mother is a former prostitute and the owner of a brothel. The play centers on the relationship between mother and daughter while also offering a social commentary to demonstrate that prostitution is not caused by moral failure but by economic necessity.
