Outside Covent Garden on a rainy evening in 1912, dishevelled cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle meets linguistic expert Henry Higgins. After delivering a musical tirade against "verbal class distinction," Higgins tells his companion Colonel Pickering that, within six months, he could transform Eliza into a proper lady, simply by teaching her proper English. My Fair Lady is about a misogynistic and snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.