Shirley Valentine Shirley Valentine Shirley Valentine is a one-character play by Willy Russell. Taking the form of a monologue by a middle-aged, working class Liverpool housewife, it focuses on her life before and after a transforming holiday abroad. Wondering what has happened to her youth and feeling stagnant and in a rut, Shirley finds herself regularly alone and talking to the wall while preparing an evening meal of egg and chips for her emotionally distant husband. When her best friend offers to pay for a trip-for-two to Greece, she packs her bags, leaves a note on the cupboard door in the kitchen,
Educating Eve Educating Eve Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate is a book by Geoffrey Sampson, providing arguments against Noam Chomsky's theory of a human instinct for (first) language acquisition. Sampson explains the original title of the book as a deliberate allusion to "Educating Rita" (1980), and uses the plot of that play to illustrate his argument. Sampson's book is a response to Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" specifically and Chomskyan linguistic nativism broadly. The title, "Educating Eve", was dropped after the first edition because the allusion to "Educating Rita" "was deemed unduly mysterious". The revised edition (2005) contains an additional chapter