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/.
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
Florence Farr
FF
's performances won the acclaim of several critics, including Yeats
himself, and her recitation technique was for a short time heralded as a new art form: according to William Archer
, in this system...
Literary responses
Augusta Gregory
Bernard Shaw
saw Lady Gregory as a born playwright . . . . doomed from the cradle to write for the stage, to break through every social obstacle to get to the stage, to refuse...
Literary responses
Radclyffe Hall
A number of writers rallied in support of RH
. E. M. Forster
and Leonard Woolf
drafted a letter protesting the suppression of The Well of Loneliness. Its signatories included Bernard Shaw
, T. S. Eliot
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.
90-2
Literary responses
Edith Somerville
He
, however, comprehensively condemned it.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
208
Another attempt to sell the manuscript, in 1935, was also a failure.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
255-6
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
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.
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.
80
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.
243
Literary responses
Christopher St John
St John said that after she published her novels George Bernard Shaw
(a great friend and supporter of her, Craig, and Tony Atwood
) suggested that she should write a history of her own unconventional...
Literary responses
Sylvia Pankhurst
The book was well received, and enhanced SP
's reputation with the general public. George Bernard Shaw
praised it in a speech on the BBC
in which he compared SP
to Joan of Arc
...
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.
240
As EB
saw it, audiences and critics considered her anti-black, anti-left, a sorry old bitch sitting in...
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
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...
