An edition of Candida (1905)

Candida

a pleasant play

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Last edited by bitnapper
November 12, 2025 | History
An edition of Candida (1905)

Candida

a pleasant play

  • 3.5 (2 ratings)
  • 11 Want to read
  • 3 Have read

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.

Shaw wrote Candida as a reaction to Henrik Ibsen’s social dramas, and especially A Doll’s House. 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.

Candida captured the public imagination by rejecting the traditional moral framing of this love triangle, with its choice between passion and duty. Instead Candida emerges as a new kind of heroine, skeptical both of her husband’s religion and her lover’s idealism.

The play became so popular in New York that one newspaper described the phenomenon as “Candidamania.” Shaw himself characteristically complained that many of those obsessed with the play had missed the point, later satirizing the “Candidamaniacs” themselves in his short play “How He Lied to Her Husband.”

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
79

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Previews available in: English Finnish Spanish

Edition Availability
Cover of: Candida
Candida
2024, Standard Ebooks
in English
Cover of: Candida
Candida
2018-02-25, LibriVox
in English
Cover of: Candida
Candida
2017-08-16, Project Gutenberg
in Finnish
Cover of: Candida
Candida
2011-07-29, LibriVox
in English
Cover of: Candida
Candida: a pleasant play
1952, Penguin Books
in English
Cover of: Cándida
Cándida: misterio en tres actos
1928, Prensa Moderna
in Spanish
Cover of: Ḳandida
Ḳandida
1923, National Yiddish Book Center
in English and Yiddish
Cover of: Candida, a mystery
Candida, a mystery
1922, Constable
in English
Cover of: Candida, a mystery
Candida, a mystery
1922, Constable
Cover of: Candida
Candida: a pleasant play
1913, Brentano's Publishers
in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Published in
New York

Classifications

Library of Congress
PR5363 .C3 1913

The Physical Object

Pagination
2 p. l., [3]-79 p.
Number of pages
79

Edition Identifiers

Open Library
OL6562940M
Internet Archive
candidapleasantp01shaw
LCCN
13026676
OCLC/WorldCat
1511385
LibraryThing
261804

Work Identifiers

Work ID
OL1066514W

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November 12, 2025 Edited by bitnapper Merge works (MRID: 250927)
April 8, 2024 Edited by AgentSapphire merge authors
January 17, 2023 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
December 17, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
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