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Mrs. Warren's Profession

Name: Mrs. Warren's Profession
Author: George Bernard Shaw
ISBN: 9781420928938

by George Bernard Bernard Shaw

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Overview

"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 mrality, 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."

Synopsis

Mrs. Warren's daughter, a well-educated young woman, discovers that her mother has amassed her wealth through organized prostitution, and still retains financial interest in several brothels. Mrs. Warren, states that prostitution is better than grinding poverty, and that true immorality is poverty and a society that condones it.

About the Author, George Bernard Shaw

L.W. Conolly is a Professor of English at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, a senior member of Robinson College, Cambridge, a Corresponding Scholar of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has published widely on British and Canadian drama and theatre.