Mrs. Warren's Profession

Vivie Warren is a new kind of woman: a cool, capable Cambridge mathematics graduate who means to make her own living and asks nothing of marriage or romance. She has been raised in comfort, at a distance from her mother, and kept in ignorance of where the money came from. When Mrs Kitty Warren arrives at her daughter's cottage — trailing a company of admirers, among them the genial rascal Sir George Crofts — Vivie at last demands the truth.

The truth is this: her mother rose out of grinding poverty by going on the streets, then built a fortune by running a chain of high-class brothels across Europe, a business she manages still. Shaw's radical stroke is what comes next. Vivie does not recoil from her mother for having been a prostitute; she hears the blazing account of the choices a poor woman actually had — the factory and an early death, or the trade that paid — and she forgives the girl who chose to survive. What she cannot forgive is that her mother carries on the business now, by choice, from wealth, when she need not.

Written in 1893 and published in 1898, Mrs Warren's Profession was refused a licence by the official censor and could not be performed publicly in England until 1925 — thirty-two years after Shaw wrote it. The scandal, Shaw insisted, was never the subject but the argument: that prostitution is a market created by the starvation wages paid to women's honest work, and that the respectable investors and landlords who quietly take its profits are the guilty parties no one thinks to blame. It is a play that indicts society, not the woman.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the play in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.