PYGMALION

a comic play (1913) by George Bernard Shaw about a professor, Henry Higgins, who teaches a young cockney flower girl , Eliza Doolittle, how to speak in an upper-class way. She becomes a success in society and falls in love with Higgins. The play was made into a successful musical comedy and film called My Fair Lady . Shaw took his title from an ancient Greek story about Pygmalion, an artist who falls in love with a statue he has created. The philologist Henry Sweet (1845–1912) is thought to be the model for Higgins.