Three Plays

Eugène Brieux's plays cut into modern life with the force of a surgeon's blade, exposing hypocrisy, family cruelty, and the moral costs hidden beneath respectability. Introduced by Bernard Shaw, this collection presents Brieux as a major dramatist in the line of Molière and Ibsen: a writer of serious purpose who rejects formula and sentimental contrivance in favor of ideas, observation, and truth. The volume includes Maternity, The Three Daughters of M. Dupont, and Damaged Goods, three provocative dramas centered on private choices, social responsibility, and the damage people inflict on one another. In The Three Daughters of M. Dupont, a long-delayed family reunion becomes a study in guilt, secrecy, and emotional exhaustion as Angèle returns after eighteen years to confront her father, her stepmother, and the sister she has not seen in years. The household is ruled by money, pride, and buried resentment, while Julie's unhappy marriage and Antonin's controlling demands reveal how domestic duty can become a form of imprisonment. Brieux turns the ordinary family into a battlefield of conscience, where every conversation threatens to uncover the truth. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.