I'm a little ashamed to say that I haven't read any George Bernard Shaw since Mrs. Warren's Profession in my University days, when the earth was a simpler place. Knowing how much I enjoyed it, I knew I was going to enjoy this one too.

There's almost zero action in this play. I say 'almost' because Eugene's hair does get disheveled at one point. It's another one of those lovely 'people standing in a room talking' plays that take up so many spots on my favourite plays list. I think it's because having so little action puts so much more weight and responsibility on the dialogue. And Shaw has always been only second to maybe Wilde when it comes to dry, witty dialogue.

There's something about this style of play that's just so outrageously and shamelessly honest. Is there anything more honest than a woman standing in between her husband and lover and asking both to state their offers? There's something so entertaining about the contrast between the outwardly civilized upper-class acting so animalistic and natural.

Reread 2021: A sassy secretary character is always a win for me. She's definitely one of the stars of this play.

Humorous & entertaining. I needed to read a play as part of my summer reading challenge. To my surprise, I read this from start to finish in one sitting. What a pleasant way to kick off summer.

A play that exposes Shaw's ideas about women and about how he viewed life in general.

Shaw on women:

1. Women belong to themselves, not to their men, which is a cool early feminist idea.
2. Women in marriage are more like mothers than partners, and men in marriage are like infantilized little boys. Which is kind of a creepy idea. And also an anti-feminist idea, because although it recognizes the "woman behind the great man", it describes a presumed duty on the part of the wife to "build" her man and be behind the scenes while doing so.

Shaw on life:

1. The poet must learn to love and then must renounce said love, renounce happiness, for the sake of freedom. In Shaw's childhood, he felt rejected by his mother, and always kept a wall of irony around his heart as a result. Whenever he carried on a flirtation with a woman, there was always a suggestion that he was only jokingly doing so.

The character of Marchbanks, the poet, is like young Shaw, who proudly and often proclaimed that he would never marry, even though he flitted from woman to woman in his infatuations. Also, Marchbanks is a third wheel in a marriage, who befriends the husband and carries on a flirtation with the wife, a role that Shaw often played in his bachelorhood.

Ironically, a few years after this play was written, Shaw got married to Charlotte Payne-Townshend, who was to fulfill a very motherly and protective role in his life, not to mention acting as his secretary and helping his writing career behind the scenes, and being his "enforcer" in financial matters. So Shaw was to later become Morell, the married man in the play.

Once you know something of Shaw's biography, this work stands as one of the most psychologically revealing of its author as any literary work.

Well-written. Typical Shaw.