Witty, exuberant and irresistibly entertaining, Shaw's fifth and most ambitious novel is a brilliant satire on social prejudice.
Witty, exuberant, and irresistibly entertaining, Shaw's fifth and most ambitious novel is a brilliant satire on social prejudiceSidney Trefusis is a proselytizing socialist. Armed with irony and paradox, he is determined to overthrow a society riddled with class and sexual exploitation. Henrietta, his adoring wife, "loves" him: he must abandon her. Son of a millionaire, he gives up everything to pose as an "umble peasant". But when this unsocial socialist goes to work as a gardener in the vicinity of a girls' school he meets his match—for Agatha Wylie is a new kind of woman, perfectly armed: and she doesn't love him. With the character of his clown-prophet Trefusis, George Bernard Shaw presented for the first time his view of what the relationship between the sexes should be.