George Bernard Shaw

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Standard Name: Shaw, George Bernard
Used Form: G. B. Shaw
GBS was a drama critic who called for reform of theatrical practice, and a dramatist who attached to his plays on publication, lengthy prefaces expounding the social and dramatic issues opened by the play itself. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him a polemicist, and says that much of the drama of his time and after was indirectly in his debt for his creation of a drama of moral passion and of intellectual conflict and debate.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Sepia head-and-shoulders photograph of George Bernard Shaw by Bains News Service, 8 November 1909. He is seen full-face, with a neat beard, gazing a little to the right with a faint smile. He wears a wool jacket and waistcoat with thin stripes, and a bowler hat slightly tilted.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Vernon Lee
Lee's publication was panned in the Times Literary Supplement, but found strong support from Desmond MacCarthy , writing as Affable Hawk in the New Statesman, and from G. B. Shaw in the Nation...
Literary responses Julia Constance Fletcher
The Athenæum found the acting brilliant but the play thin and badly constructed, its burlesque provoking irritation as well as mirth. Yet it bracketed Fleming with Bernard Shaw , and gave her points for her...
Literary responses Sylvia Pankhurst
The sometimes provoking George Bernard Shaw saw the translation in manuscript and offered effusive praise in a private letter: Sylvia, you are the queerest idiot-genius of this age . . . the most ungovernable, self-intoxicated...
Literary responses Sylvia Pankhurst
Save the Mothers was well reviewed. George Bernard Shaw responded enthusiastically to the book, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence expressed her pleasure at its positive reception. Vera Brittain also praised it, favourably comparing SP 's activism for...
Literary responses George Egerton
Both lauded and lambasted, GE was a sexually radical writer who challenged English reserve and literary reticence through the directness of her treatment of female desire.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman. Manchester University Press, 1997.
188
But after all her popularity and notoriety at...
Literary responses Annie Besant
George Bernard Shaw discovered AB 's turn to Theosophy when he found proofs for this publication on her desk; his reaction was intense and negative.
Dinnage, Rosemary. Annie Besant. Penguin, 1986.
80
Literary responses Helen Waddell
Two Dublin actors, HW 's brother Sam and Lennox Robinson , praised the play for the opportunities it offered to performers, and Waddell was very excited when George Bernard Shaw read and liked it.
Blackett, Monica. The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. Constable, 1973.
90-2
Literary responses Lady Colin Campbell
Widely read and highly praised, LCC was described as among the best art critics of her time, doing for the visual arts what her colleague George Bernard Shaw was doing for music.
Fleming, G. H. Lady Colin Campbell: Victorian ’Sex Goddess’. The Windrush Press, 1989.
243
Literary responses Edith Somerville
He , however, comprehensively condemned it.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
208
Another attempt to sell the manuscript, in 1935, was also a failure.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
255-6
Literary responses Ethel Wilson
Negative reviews seemed to repeat Macmillan 's original worry that the collection was half-cooked. Aunt Topaz was characterized by the Canadian Forum as a terrible bore, whom the reviewer found almost as tiresome to...
Literary responses Henrik Ibsen
In The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), George Bernard Shaw catalogues some of the extreme reactions of English theatre critics to the play: Absolutely loathsome and fetid. . . . Unutterably offensive. . . . Most...
Literary responses Sarah Grand
Feminists, social reformers, and literary men, such as Mark Twain , George Meredith , and George Bernard Shaw , greeted this novel with excitement and appreciation.
Mitchell, Sally, and Sarah Grand. “Introduction”. The Beth Book, Thoemmes, 1994, p. v - xxiv.
vi
SG wrote a caustic letter to the Daily...
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
Call Me Jacky was, as EB 's biographer Anne Sebba put it, her most disastrous failure yet.
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
240
As EB saw it, audiences and critics considered her anti-black, anti-left, a sorry old bitch sitting in...
Literary responses Elizabeth Baker
Critic Sheila Stowell , contrasting Baker's heroine with Bernard Shaw 's more ambivalent characterizations of the New Woman, sees the role of Edith as a clear and positive alternative for women.
Stowell, Sheila. A Stage of Their Own. University of Michigan Press, 1992.
103
Weiss, Rudolf. “Versions of Emancipation: The Dramatic World of Elizabeth Baker”. Sprachkunst, Vol.
20
, No. 2, 1989, pp. 305-16.
311
Literary responses Oscar Wilde
Shaw 's review for The Saturday Review welcomed its modern note.
qtd. in
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Knopf, 1988.
428-9

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