Plot Summary

The poor, lower-class girl Eliza Dolittle sells flowers at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral to passers-by. Her plain jargon, her headstrong way of expressing herself, fascinates the briefly passing-by language researcher and phonetics teacher professor Higgins. He meets a good acquaintance, colonel Pickering, who is also interested in science, and makes a wager with him: Higgins bets that he can accomplish that, within just six months, he can turn the squalid girl with grubby looks into a gentle lady of the London society with splendid manners and a likewise pronunciation. Eliza may not know what’s coming for her, but after some persuasiveness, she agrees to move into the fine house of the professor.