Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Bernard Shaw
-
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/.
This popular play saw two West End revivals the following year. First it had thirty-nine performances at His Majesty's Theatre
alongside Bernard Shaw
's The Admirable Bashville, and this was followed by ninety-eight performances...
Textual Features
Winifred Peck
The story opens with a young man returning from the First World War and ends with young people returning from the second. At the outset seventeen-year-old Miranda Rae, living in Devon with her family, receives...
Cultural formation
Amber Reeves
Born a New Zealander, she clearly regarded herself later in life as English. Her parents were highly educated professionals. Her mother was a suffragist, and both parents became members of the Fabian Society
(founded three...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under William Pember Reeves
Family and Intimate relationships
Amber Reeves
AR
's time at the London School of Economics was ended when she became pregnant as a result of a sexual liaison with H. G. Wells
, which had begun while she was at Cambridge...
Fictionalization
Amber Reeves
After the appearance of her first three novels, two critics gave AR
a significant place in accounts of the current state of fiction. R. Brimley Johnson
characterised her as a sex-explorer, free from either...
It was substantially completed in draft before she moved in 1903 from Germany to England. There she felt that literature was at a low ebb, with an insular public which valued only utilitarian writers like...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Robins
ER
was romantically linked to William Archer
for most of the 1890s.
John, Angela V. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952. Routledge.
79
She also had a long, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes friendly relationship with George Bernard Shaw
.
John, Angela V. Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862-1952. Routledge.
81-2
In 1909 and 1910, she carried...
Reception
Elizabeth Robins
On ER
's request, Cicely Hamilton
adapted the novel as a play, but it was never performed. The Lord Chamberlain refused to license it on the grounds that it ought not be allowed to run...
Occupation
Dora Russell
During this period, DR
's energies were centred significantly but not exclusively on her own family. In 1922 she helped her husband with his parliamentary campaign and began her critical work The Religion of the...
Sylvia Pankhurst
enrolled her son as a day-boy at Beacon Hill, and lived nearby while writing The Suffragette Movement; Beatrice
and Sidney Webb
, and G. B. Shaw
also visited. The school hosted annual...
Occupation
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
She served as the club's organizer and hostess. She intended it as a space where fledgling writers could gather and make contact with established authors. Her friend J. D. Beresford
, novelist, was the club's...
