3 h 58 minAudiobook5 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · 97 pagesHardcover · 6 × 9 in · 97 pagesAbout this book
What if the money that gives you independence comes from choices you cannot accept?
Vivie Warren wants useful work, honest dealings, and a living she earns herself. Then she discovers that her mother, Mrs. Warren, builds her comfortable life on the business of prostitution. In Bernard Shaw’s play, a family confrontation becomes a struggle over what a daughter owes her mother—and herself.
Mrs. Warren defends her choices by describing the exhausting labour and miserable pay available to poor women. But understanding those pressures does not settle Vivie’s questions. Around them, wealthy business partner Sir George Crofts and charming, dependent Frank Gardner bring money, marriage, and respectability into a debate where affection offers no easy answers.
What you’ll discover
- An independent young woman Meet Vivie, whose commitment to work tests the claims of family, comfort, and romance.
- A mother's forceful defence Hear Mrs. Warren explain the narrow choices that make survival a question of money.
- The cost of respectability See how Sir George Crofts connects a respectable social position with profits from prostitution.
- Conversation with sharp edges Follow confrontations where offers of affection and security become tests of what Vivie will tolerate.
- Understanding without easy acceptance Explore the uneasy distance between recognising another person’s hardship and accepting the choices they make.
Who will love it
You will enjoy this if you like sharp stage dialogue, strong women characters, and plays that argue about money, class and respectability while keeping you curious about a family secret.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Vivie Warren trusts work, not romance
- Mrs Warren arrives with unwelcome company
- A clergyman recognises Mrs Warren
- Parents forbid the match and Crofts makes a bid
- Vivie demands the truth from her mother
- Mrs Warren tells how poverty shaped her
- What the play argues and how it is told
Who’s who
- Vivie WarrenA twenty-two-year-old Cambridge mathematician who wants an office, a wage and independence, and who insists on knowing the truth about her mother.
- Mrs WarrenVivie's loud, shrewd mother, who rose from poverty and wants her daughter's respect and company.
- Sir George CroftsA rich baronet and Mrs Warren's business partner, who has begun to take a dangerous interest in Vivie.
- PraedAn artistic, gentle architect and old friend of Mrs Warren, who loves beauty and wants to protect Vivie.
- Frank GardnerA charming, penniless young man who flirts with Mrs Warren and wants to marry Vivie.
- The Reverend Samuel GardnerFrank's pompous father, the rector, who fears that his past will come out.
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Mrs. Warren's Profession in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Mrs. Warren's Profession
by Bernard Shaw · 1898
A Cambridge mathematician meets her mother's friends and asks one blunt question: who is Mrs Warren?
Medium level2–5 hours to read25 languages
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In short
What does a brilliant young woman do when she begins to suspect how her mother earned the money for her education? Mrs Warren's Profession is a play by Bernard Shaw, with a long preface in which he defends it.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Vivie Warren trusts work, not romance
She cares for figures, cigars, detective novels and a good wage, and she says she has no use for beauty or romance.
The play opens in a cottage garden near Haslemere in Surrey. Vivie lies in a hammock among serious books when Mr Praed, an artistic architect and an old friend of her mother, comes to call. She tells him she studied hard only because her mother paid her fifty pounds. Concerts in London bored her, but a month of calculations in Chancery Lane with her friend Honoria Fraser was bliss.
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What is Mrs Warren's Profession about?
It follows Vivie Warren, a young mathematician, as she meets her mother's circle and begins to ask where the family money comes from. The play examines poverty, hypocrisy and what a mother and daughter owe each other.
What is Mrs Warren's profession?
The play keeps the answer in front of the audience as a secret that the characters circle around. Shaw's preface makes plain that his subject is prostitution and the social conditions that push women toward it.
Why was Mrs Warren's Profession banned?
The censor of stage plays refused it a license because of its subject. It was first performed in 1902 at a private club in London, and Shaw's preface is partly a defence of the play against censorship.
The author
Bernard Shaw
1856–1950 · Irish playwright and critic
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright and critic. Born in Dublin, he moved to London in 1876 and later lived in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, where he died. His plays include Arms and the Man (1894), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905), and Pygmalion (1912).
More by Bernard Shaw
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