In the glass-roofed conservatory of John Tarleton — a hearty, self-made underwear manufacturer who has discovered books and won't stop telling everyone what to read — a houseful of articulate people settle in to do what Shaw's people always do: argue. They argue about marriage and money, about class and the gulf between the generations, while Tarleton's restless daughter Hypatia grows bored to distraction and her listless aristocratic fiancé looks on.

Then the roof falls in. An aeroplane crashes through the glass, and out of the wreckage climb two extraordinary strangers: the dashing aviator Joey Percival and his passenger Lina Szczepanowska, a Polish acrobat and aviatrix — fearless, free, and entirely unlike anything in the Tarleton household. Lina proceeds to upend everyone she meets, and by the time a frightened young clerk is found hiding with a grievance and a pistol, the comfortable certainties of the house have been thoroughly demolished.

First staged in 1910, Misalliance is the purest example of Shaw's "discussion play": a single continuous act in which almost nothing happens and everything is at stake, where every character is also an argument and the wit never lets up. Its great theme is the unbridgeable strangeness between parents and children — the wall "ten feet thick and ten miles high" — and around it Shaw gathers his perennial subjects: class and the self-made man, marriage and the Life Force, and the exhilarating freedom of the New Woman who falls out of the sky. It is published here with Shaw's long companion essay, "A Treatise on Parents and Children," one of the finest things he ever wrote.

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.