Candida

<p>The Reverend James Mavor Morell, a respectable socialist clergyman, spends his days giving lectures and sermons while his wife, Candida, sees to his comfortable London home. That home is disrupted by the arrival of the poet Eugene Marchbanks, who is in love with Candida and determined to rescue her from what he sees as an unromantic life.</p> <p><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-bernard-shaw">Shaw</a> wrote <i>Candida</i> as a reaction to <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henrik-ibsen">Henrik Ibsen’s</a> social dramas, and especially <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henrik-ibsen/a-dolls-house/r-farquharson-sharp"><i>A Doll’s House</i></a>. But where Ibsen’s play is bleak and harrowing, Shaw’s answer takes the form of a conventional drawing-room comedy, complete with comic relief characters in the form of a Cockney capitalist and a short-tempered typist.</p> <p><i>Candida</i> captured the public imagination by rejecting the traditional moral framing of this love triangle, with its choice between passion and duty.