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.
This witty comedy of ideas is a sharp, entertaining look at the conventions of marriage and romantic idealism, from one of the English language's greatest playwrights.
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.
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