At the country house of Captain Shotover — a fierce, half-mad old sea captain in his eighties, retired from the sea to invent and to prophesy — a weekend party gathers. Young Ellie Dunn arrives at the invitation of the bewitching Hesione Hushabye, engaged to a coarse, wealthy businessman and half in love with a romantic stranger who proves to be Hesione's own husband. Over a single restless weekend every illusion in the house is gently, devastatingly broken.

Shaw subtitles the play "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes" — an open homage to Chekhov — and the house itself is built to look like a ship, its inhabitants drifting without a course. Against "Heartbreak House," the world of the cultured, sensitive, and idle, Shaw sets "Horseback Hall," the world of the hearty and unthinking gentry; between them, he suggests, England has been left without anyone fit to steer. "Navigation," the old captain growls. "Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned."

Begun before the First World War and finished during it, Heartbreak House is Shaw's bleakest and most prophetic play — a portrait of a leisured civilisation drifting rudderless toward catastrophe, ending with an air raid that both thrills and destroys. Shaw refused to have it staged until the war was over, believing it could not be understood before then, and published it in 1919 with one of his longest and most searching prefaces.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the play in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.