The Pygmalion of legend falls in love with his perfect statue and persuades Venus to bring her to life so that he can marry her. But Shaw radically reworks Ovid's tale to give it a feminist slant: while self-absorbed phoneticist Henry Higgins agrees to teach flower girl Eliza Dolittle to speak and act like a duchess only in order to fulfill his mentorial whim, she asserts her independence, adamantly refusing to be his creation.

Pygmalion was published in Everybody's Magazine in 1914.