Word: eliza
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...classic, folded in a dash of "middle class morality" and a measure of Cheapside Cockney, and turned out one of his most palatable and humorous plots. Professor Henry Higgins, a middle-aged bachelor and phonetics expert, takes it upon himself to teach cultured English to a poor flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, and then pass her off as English nobility. For months he drills, cudgels, and bullies her, until "'Enry 'Iggins" becomes "Henry Higgins," and the Bunsen flame in front of Eliza's mouth flickers visibly with every "h." Finally comes the great test, and sweeping a starchy Ambassador's Ball...
This want ad, signed "Henry Higgins," ran for two days in three New York City newspapers; it drew more than 100 replies. Seven of the young women who applied displayed a suspicious literacy by insisting that their names were Eliza Doolittle...
...Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Phonetician Henry Higgins undertakes to make a lady of Cockney Eliza Doolittle by teaching her to speak properly...
Kittery Point was shocked that Eliza Wall, a well-bred, teen-age schoolgirl, should run after a one-eyed French Canadian kid named Claw Moreau, whose family was on town relief. At first, in school, she had been repulsed by his rude speech, the sinister black patch over his missing eye, the squalor of the wharfside shack where his husbandless mother carelessly raised her children, the fixed lines of bitterness which came from learning early that he was a social outcast. Later Eliza's fear became curiosity; and as she grew older, sympathy...
Their intense, unhappy childish love affair becomes a public topic, and the moral heat is put on them. In desperation they run away, but are picked up and brought back. Eliza is sent to respectable friends in Boston for a few weeks to get over her experience. When she returns, she discovers that Claw's raging frustration and craving for emotional revenge have led him into a calculated affair with her younger sister. The weather in Eliza's heart has already begun to change: now it becomes cold and bleak and their relationship ends with cruelty on both...