Mrs Warrens Profession (Broadview Editions) - Softcover

Bernard Shaw

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551116278 ISBN 13: 9781551116273

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2005

Synopsis

Bernard Shaw’s most notorious play, banned from the English stage for nearly thirty years, is now available in a stand-alone edition enhanced by a wide range of historical documents.|One of Bernard Shaw’s early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren’s Profession places the protagonist’s decision to become a prostitute in the context of the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.”

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Wisenthal is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and the author of several books, including Shaw's Sense of History.


Daniel O'Leary is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal and a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel and The History of the Book in Canada.

From the Back Cover

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."

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1551116278
• ISBN 13: 9781551116273
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 246