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Candida

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About this book

In a London parsonage overlooking Victoria Park, the Reverend James Mavor Morell fits church work and political speaking into an overflowing diary. His typist, Proserpine Garnett, treats some of his prospective audiences with impatience, while he insists on their claim to his time. The opening of this play sets his cheerful confidence against her brisk replies, with detailed stage directions giving the busy room and its inhabitants a life beyond their speeches.

Domestic work sharpens the arguments when Marchbanks objects to Candida filling the lamps. Morell explains that everyone in the household lends a hand, but Marchbanks sees her fingers handling oil as a reproach to her husband's comfortable talk. Burgess adds his complaints and amused commentary to the exchange. Readers interested in the strain between public ideals and everyday habits will find it expressed through household chores, wounded pride and comic interruptions.

About the author

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, and socialist polemicist who became the leading English-language dramatist of his era. A co-founder of the Fabian Society, he used comedy to attack social hypocrisy and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.