In a diary entry dated February 21, 1920, poet and writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote of George Bernard Shaw: “He is an ugly fellow, too, his face pasty white, with a red nose and a rusty red beard, and little slatey-blue eyes.”1 Above these eyes, Irish editor and writer Frank Harris noted, were “straight eyebrows tending a little upwards at the outside and thus adding a touch of the familiar Mephistophelian sarcasm to the alert keen expression.”2 Fellow Fabian Sydney Olivier wrote about Shaw’s “dead white complexion and orange patches of whisker about his cheek and his chin,” and recalled Henry Hyde Champion likening him to “an unskillfully poached egg.”3 Poor Shaw had only grown his “straggly beard” to conceal scars left by smallpox, which he, like Hubert, had contracted in 1881.
Hubert, who was a careful and flashy dresser, remarked on Shaw’s shabbiness: “When I first knew Bernard Shaw,” said Hubert Bland, the journalist, author, and Fabian,
his costume was unmistakably, arrantly Bohemian. . . . Shaw wore a pair of tawny trousers, distinguished for their baggy appearance, a long cutaway coat which had once been black, but was then a dingy green, cuffs which he was now and then compelled, cruel though it was, to trim to the quick, and a tall silk hat, which had been battered down so often that it had a thousand creases in it from top to crown. Ah, that was a wonderful hat! . . . Shaw had to turn it around when he put it on, because it was broken in the middle, and if he wore it in the usual way it would fall limply together when removed from his head.4
Poverty dictated Shaw’s careless appearance. When he received a life assurance payment upon the death of his father, he bought a suit from the newly opened Dr. Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen System shop on Fore Street in London. He insisted that this getup, made from undyed wool stockinette, allowed his body to breathe, but Frank Harris remarked that he looked like “a forked radish in a worsted bifurcated stocking.”5 Shaw had plenty to say about Hubert’s appearance too. He dubbed him “the eyeglassed and indomitable Bland,” and counted him among a group of Fabian men of “exceptional character and attainments.”6 His comments on Hubert were reported in an article for the Evening Dispatch:
He was always a very striking figure. He was an enormously powerful man physically; he had such immense shoulders that none of us would sit next to him in a room, because his shoulders occupied the space of three chairs. He had to leave room between the Hubert and the Bland and a chair space on either side of him to allow his shoulders to work.7
Most people understood that Shaw’s attractions lay beneath the superficial. As Harris noted, he was “above all a charming talker with enough brogue to make women appraise him with an eye to capture.”8 Blunt declared:
Shaw’s appearance, however, matters little when he begins to talk, if he can ever be said to begin, for he talks always in his fine Irish brogue. His talk is like his plays, a string of paradoxes, and he is ready to be switched on to any subject one pleases and to talk brilliantly on all.9
It was a fellow Fabian who provided the best encapsulation: “Mr Shaw’s position, as I understand it, is one of pure, unadulterated individualism.”10 He could be infuriatingly enigmatic. Asked what he thought of “G.B.S.,” Shaw replied that G.B.S. was “one of the most successful of my fictions” and “about as real as a pantomime ostrich.”11 In fact he was excruciatingly shy and described himself as “nervous and self-conscious to a heartbreaking degree.” Since he spilled over with opinions on every topic, he cultivated a deceptive “air of impudence.”12
George Bernard Shaw, nicknamed “Sonny” in boyhood, was born on July 26, 1856, at 3 Upper Synge Street in the lower-middle-class Portobello district of Dublin city. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual, alcoholic civil servant turned corn merchant, and his wife, Lucinda Elizabeth “Bessie” Shaw, an accomplished amateur singer. His two older sisters were Lucinda, always called Lucy, and Elinor Agnes, whom they called “Yuppy.” He told the actress Ellen Terry that his was “a devil of a childhood . . . rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities.”13
Shaw’s mother, whom he regarded as “a Bohemian anarchist with ladylike habits,” introduced music into his life but remained distant otherwise.14 In adulthood he dreamed she was also his wife, a fantasy that would have intrigued Freud. Interestingly, it was said that Freud remarked: “Shaw does not understand sex. He has not the remotest conception of love. There is no real love affair in his plays.”15 The young Shaw was strongly influenced by Bessie Shaw’s singing teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, a man he considered “mesmeric” and “daringly original.” It was Lee who prompted Shaw’s lifelong habits of eating brown bread and sleeping with the windows open. Although Lee lived with the family for a time, Shaw insisted that his relationship with Bessie was purely professional. He told Frank Harris:
I was brought up in a ménage à trois (we kept joint household with a musician who was a bit of a genius as a teacher of singing and conductor, with my mother as his prima donna and lieutenant).16
When Lee moved to London in May 1873, Bessie followed with Yuppy and Lucy in tow. Lucy became a successful music hall singer, but poor Yuppy died of pulmonary tuberculosis in a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight in March 1876. Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, a man he regarded as “humane and likable” although he was utterly undone by drink.17 He accepted a junior clerkship with a firm of estate managers. For £18 (approximately £2,000, or USD$2,600 today) a year he sat in “a stuffy little den counting another man’s money.” He did well there and was promoted, but he regarded the whole enterprise as a “damnable waste of human life.” In March 1876 he too left for London.
In London Shaw tried unsuccessfully for the civil service. He drifted for three years before accepting a job as Wayleave Manager with the Edison Telephone Company, where he was responsible for securing permission for the running of telephone lines through private property. He resigned in June 1880. That December he moved with his mother to an unfurnished apartment at 37 Fitzroy Street, close to the newly electrified reading room at the British Museum. By then he had written Immaturity, a semiautobiographical novel that was rejected time and time again. By the time it was published by Constable in 1931, its author was fêted as a celebrated playwright and intellectual.
Shaw spent his evenings at lectures and society meetings, where he mixed with the most radical thinkers in London. Soon he was contributing from the floor during every debate. He styled himself an “independent radical” in search of a political home. He was on the verge of joining the SDF when he met Hubert in the offices of the Christian Socialist in May 1884. Sensing a potential convert, Hubert invited Shaw to attend the next meeting of the Fabian Society and sent him a copy of Fabian Tract No. 1—Why Are the Many Poor?
It seemed clear to Shaw that the Fabians represented “a body of educated middle-class intelligentsia, my own class in fact.”18 He attended a meeting on May 16, 1884, and wrote in the minutes, “this meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Bernard Shaw.”19 In September he was accepted as a member and he was elected to the Executive the following May. That same month, in a stirring address, he outlined seventeen propositions that were adopted as the first Fabian Society manifesto. Edward Pease described them as “unqualified Shaw.”20
According to Ada Chesterton, Cecil’s wife, Bernard Shaw and Hubert Bland were the “star turns” of the Fabian Society:
Some of the committee members suggested a diet of nuts and undiluted vitamins but their drabness faded at the sight of G.B.S.s flaming red head and general flamboyance. Hubert Bland, refulgent in eyeglass, smartly cut clothes, stiff shirt and collar and exotic tie, looked like a dashing company promoter at a Convocation of Rural Deans, or a sinister international spy at a meeting of the Junior Navy league.21
Another Fabian, Jerome K. Jerome, attributed the theatrical atmosphere of their meetings to the presence of Shaw. In autumn 1886 Shaw delivered a lecture on “Socialism and the Family.” Afterward, referring to himself, Shaw penciled in the minute book: “This was one of Shaw’s most outrageous performances.” He could be deadly serious too. Edith regarded him as “the most interesting” of the Fabians. She painted a perfect little pen portrait for Ada Breakell:
G.B.S. has a fund of dry Irish humour that is simply irresistible. He is a very clever writer and speaker—is the grossest flatterer (of men, women and children impartially) I ever met, is horribly untrustworthy as he repeats everything he hears, and does not always stick to the truth, and is very plain like a long corpse with a dead white face—sandy sleek hair, and a loathsome small straggly beard, and yet is one of the most fascinating men I ever met.22
In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Edith cast Shaw as Mr. Henry, Daphne’s love interest, and has her declare: “I wish he would fall in love with me. I’d soon put him in his place. It would be a real pleasure to do it. But he’s not likely to. I believe he hates me, really.”23 Edith would have benefited from the advice offered by fellow Fabian Beatrice Webb, who declared: “You cannot fall in love with a sprite and Shaw is a sprite in such matters, not a real person.”24 Peevish at times and inclined to hypochondria, Shaw seemed an unlikely object of romantic desire. He could be infuriatingly self-absorbed and exceptionally set in his ways. Once, when Lady Randolph Churchill invited him to lunch, he telegraphed “Certainly not! What have I done to provoke such an attack on my well-known habits?” To her credit, she replied “Know nothing of your habits. Hope they are not as bad as your manners.”25 Lunch rarely figured in Shaw’s daily routine, which he outlined in a letter to E. D. Girdlestone:
I do not smoke, though I am not intolerant of that deplorable habit in others [he later admitted that he hated to see women smoke]. I do not eat meat nor drink alcohol. Tea I also bar, and coffee. My three meals are Breakfast—cocoa and porridge; Dinner—the usual fare with a penn’orth of stewed Indian corn, haricot beans or whatnot in the place of the cow; and “Tea”—cocoa and brown bread, or eggs. [Sunday dinner was] brown bread and cheese, with a glass of milk and an apple.26
Yet, for all his eccentricity, Shaw had survived several romantic entanglements by the time Edith was extolling his virtues. He portrayed himself as hapless prey and told Frank Harris: “I did not need to pursue women; I was pursued by them.”27 This appeared to irk him. “Whenever I have been left alone in a room with a susceptible female,” he told Hesketh Pearson, “she has invariably thrown her arms round me and declared that she adored me.”28 In Shaw’s novel Love Among the Artists (1881) young women are drawn inexplicably to taciturn musical composer Owen Jack. “He was not conventionally handsome,” admits one admirer, “but there was something about him that I cannot very well describe. It was a sort of latent power.”29
Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary: “Adored by many women, he [Shaw] is a born philanderer.”30 Hubert, who was a serial and unapologetic womanizer, declared that Shaw seemed “obsessed by Woman . . . terrified by Woman, dominated by Woman.”31 While convalescing from scarlet fever at the home of a maternal uncle in 1882, he had become embroiled in a desultory romance with trainee nurse Alice Lockett. To keep up their connection after he left, she took music lessons from his mother. This relationship appears to have been comparatively chaste; Shaw’s biographer Stanley Weintraub described it as more epistolary than physical.32 It was over by 1885, but they corresponded for years, and he lent her money when her husband was called up during the First World War.33 She inspired the spirited character Gertrude Lindsay in his novel An Unsocial Socialist (1887).
Shaw’s relationship with Jenny Patterson, a friend and pupil of his mother’s, was far more significant. She informed hot-tempered Blanche Sartorius in Widowers’ Houses (1892) and stormy Julia Craven in The Philanderer (1893). In a diary entry dated July 26, 1885, his twenty-ninth birthday, he noted that he lost his virginity to Patterson, an event he described as “a new experience.”34 Insisting this was his “first connection of the kind,” he wrote: “I was an absolute novice. I did not take the initiative in the matter.”35 Yet he was being coy, since he had recorded on July 18 that he had purchased “some fl,” an abbreviation of French letters, or condoms.36
Shaw’s attitude to sex was distinctly odd. When Cecil Chesterton asked him if he was “puritan in practice,” he was reported to have replied that “the sexual act was to him monstrous and indecent and that he could not understand how any self-respecting couple could face each other in the daylight after spending the night together.”37 Hesketh Pearson insisted that Shaw believed the most satisfactory way of procreating “would be for a crowd of healthy men and women to meet in the dark, to couple, and then to separate without having seen one another’s faces.”38 Shaw himself wrote: “I was not impotent; I was not sterile; I was not homosexual; and I was extremely susceptible, though not promiscuously.”39
His friendships with women, although often platonic, were more intimate than was generally the case at that time. In 1886 he withdrew from a burgeoning relationship with fellow Fabian Annie Besant because he was fearful that it “threatened to become a vulgar intrigue.”40 Yet it was he who had suggested they cohabit, since she was not free to marry. She responded by presenting him with a list of terms that he deemed “worse than all the vows of all the churches on earth.”41 She had been helpful to him professionally, serializing his novels and employing him as art critic for Our Corner. She was impressed by his commitment to Socialism: “I found that he was very poor,” she wrote, “because he was a writer with principles and preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism.” Besant inspired the heroic Raina Petkoff in his play Arms and the Man (1894).
In a similar fashion, Shaw withdrew from a potential relationship with William Morris’s daughter May, who was an exceptionally accomplished artist in her own right. They had become staunch friends after they met at a lecture he delivered. Although she sent him a beautiful Valentine card in February 1886, nothing developed between them. In 1890 she married Henry Halliday Sparling, secretary of the Socialist League. Shaw stayed with the couple in 1892 when the drains needed mending at 29 Fitzroy Square. He described his time there as “probably the happiest passage in our three lives.” For some reason he became convinced that he had experienced a “mystic betrothal” with May.42 Yet he stopped short of a full-blown love affair and told Hesketh Pearson:
To be welcomed in his [Sparling’s] house and then steal his wife was revolting to my sense of honour and socially inexcusable; for though I was as extreme a freethinker on sexual and religious questions as any sane human being could be . . . I knew that a scandal would damage both of us and damage The Cause as well.43
The marriage did not survive, and Sparling, who had little interest in the nuances of a “mystic betrothal,” left for Paris. He confided in journalist Holbrook Jackson, who explained:
After completely captivating his wife Shaw suddenly disappeared, leaving behind him a desolate female who might have been an iceberg so far as her future relations with her husband went.44
Shaw’s relationships were not always so fraught or damaging. He became what he described as a “Sunday husband” to Eleanor Marx while she was ensnared in a desperately one-sided free union—a romantic partnership without legal or religious recognition—with Edward Aveling, an untrustworthy philanderer. Edith too befriended Marx and invited this troubled young woman to her home. Ashamed that she was not free to marry Aveling, who had not divorced his first wife, she explained: “I could not bear that one I feel such deep sympathy for as yourself should think ill of, or misunderstand us.”45 She clearly had no idea how unconventional Edith’s marriage was. As Shaw noted, Hubert, in direct contradiction to his own philandering, “held the most severe and rigid sentiments in all sex questions,” and took “a violently condemnatory tone in denouncing everybody who made any attempt at sexual freedom.” Shaw did point out that his position was “fundamentally a little weak.”46
Although he regarded Hubert as “an affectionate, imaginative sort of person,” Shaw acknowledged that he was “not a restful husband.”47 Little wonder Hubert informed Hector Hushabye, the roguish womanizer from Heartbreak House (1919). Hushabye is a “very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate walking-stick.” This passage of dialogue could have been lifted from one of Hubert’s essays, although there are elements of Shaw here too:
She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love to her automatically. What am I to do? I can’t fall in love; and I can’t hurt a woman’s feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I’m not a bit in earnest.48
On March 6, 1885, Shaw called on Eleanor Marx and found Edith there with Philip Bourke Marston, her sister Mary’s former fiancé. Three days later Edith and Shaw met once again at Marx’s house. Afterward they walked together to Charing Cross station, where he waited with her until she boarded her train.49 Soon Shaw was a regular visitor to the Bland home. On occasion, Hubert and he would don boxing gloves to engage in a bout of sparring; Shaw noted one such occasion in his diary on May 18, 1885. According to Frank Harris:
Edith Nesbitt [sic], poetess and fairy-tale writer, rather mischievously set him sparring once or twice with her husband, Hubert Bland, a really formidable heavy-weight, who was fortunately merciful.50
Hubert was a skilled boxer, but Shaw was the taller of the two and had a longer reach. He had also competed in the Queensberry Amateur Boxing Championships of 1883.
When Shaw paid a visit to the Bland home in August 1885, Edith, Hubert, and he got caught up in “an energetic discussion on the subject of whipping children.”51 He bumped into Edith at the British Museum a few days later, and they continued this discussion. From March 1886 onward, Edith’s name begins to appear with greater frequency in Shaw’s diary. They would bump into each other in the reading room of the British Museum and head for lunch or hot chocolate. On Saturday June 26, Shaw noted:
Mrs Bland at museum. I did some German and read a little P E [Political Economy] for my lecture; but on the whole the day was devoted to Mrs Bland. We dined together, had tea together and I went out to Lee with her, and played and sang there until Bland came in from his volunteer work. A memorable evening!52
Underneath he totted up the expenses he had incurred. He had been obliged to borrow money from Edith to pay for first-class train tickets, an extravagance that was almost certainly motivated by their desire for privacy. When he repaid her loan by postal order the following Monday, she sent a playful letter of thanks and told him she was looking forward to meeting him at Annie Besant’s house the following day, since she wanted his opinion on something she had written; “make fun of it as much as you like, to me,” she teased.53 In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Mr. Henry dismisses Daphne’s drawings as “rubbish” and advises her to burn them. “What’s the good of getting a little money if you can’t look yourself in the face afterward?” he chastises.54 They left Annie Besant’s house together and had supper at the Wheatsheaf, one of Shaw’s favorite vegetarian restaurants.
On July 8, Edith and Shaw attended a meeting of the Vigilance Committee of the Tower Hamlets Radical Club. Afterward they took a cab to Ludgate Hill and a train to Blackheath, then walked almost as far as Edith’s home in Lee. It took Shaw more than two hours to trudge back to his lodgings on Osnaburgh Street, which he reached sometime after half past three in the morning. He took Edith back there two weeks later. However, he was taken aback when she turned up early the following morning while he was having breakfast with his mother. They arranged to meet in Regent’s Park at ten o’clock and walked for an hour. At least one account has it that Edith was walking arm in arm with Shaw in Regent’s Park, chatting in a ladylike fashion, when she suddenly exclaimed, “Shaw, I do believe it’s going to rain like Hell.” This outburst was thought to have influenced a scene in Pygmalion. When Freddy asks Eliza if she is going to walk across the park, she replies, “Walk? Not bloody likely!”55
Decades later, when he recalled this period of his life, Shaw described Edith as “very attractive” and insisted he had been “very fond of her and paid her all the attention I could.”56 Yet by September 1886 he was reverting to his evasive habits. A peevish diary entry for September 15 records that Edith “would not be denied coming back here to tea.” Three days later he “began composing a song to Mrs Bland’s words.”57 His desire to bring matters to a close may be evident in his refusal to continue paying for first-class rail travel. They traveled second-class to Finsbury on the evening of October 25 before switching to third-class, “for the sake of company” he noted in his diary, and disembarking at Enfield, where they endured a miserable walk in the rain. At least Shaw relented and bought Edith a hot whisky before accompanying her first-class to Pentonville, where she was staying at the time. On Halloween night they met at Portland Road Station at ten o’clock, in the rain, in order to walk “along Camden Road, Caledonian Road and Barnsbury Square,” where they planned to “look at the house she lived in as a girl.” He left her in Claremont Square and walked home alone.58
As 1886 came to a close, Shaw, who liked to sum up each year at the back of his diary, noted:
E.B. (Mrs Bland known as Edith Nesbit by her poetry.) One of the women with whom the Fabian Society brought me into contact. On the 26th June 1886 I discovered that she had become passionately attached to me. As she was a married woman with children and her husband my friend and colleague, she had to live down her fancy. We remained very good friends.59
He was fully aware of the dangers involved. “It is only natural that a man should establish friendly relationships with the wives of his friends,” he told Hesketh Pearson, “but if he is wise he puts all idea of sex out of the question.”60 Pearson believed that Shaw “steered” Edith “through her infatuation as best he could, finally keeping her just off the rocks.” In Don Giovanni Explains, an autobiographical short story Shaw wrote in the summer of 1887, he declared:
People who are much admired often get wheedled or persecuted into love affairs with persons whom they would have let alone if they themselves had been let alone.61
Little wonder fellow Fabian Grace Black, sister of trade unionist Clementina Black and another would-be lover, begged him to “care more for people for that is where you seem to fail.”62 He remained resolute. “Women are nothing to me,” he told actress Janet Achurch. “This heart is a rock: they will make grindstones for diamonds out of it after I am dead.”63 In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Daphne criticizes Shaw’s Man and Superman, prompting Mr. Henry to ask: “You think it’s always the men who do the running.” “Isn’t it?” she replies. “Yes,” he agrees. “In books.”64
It seems their relationship remained unconsummated. Shaw confirmed as much in a letter to American actress Molly Tompkins, dated February 22, 1925:
I remember a well known poetess (now no more) saying to me when I refused to let her commit adultery with me, “You had no right to write the preface if you were not going to write the book.”65
Edith channeled her disappointment into her poetry. In “The Depths of the Sea,” a poem inspired by the Edward Burne-Jones painting of the same name, she likened herself to a mermaid who yearns for a mortal man before dragging him to his death.
So I—seeing you above me—turn and tire,
Sick with an empty ache of long desire
To drag you down, to hold you, make you mine!
Denied her prize, she laments:
So I—I long for what, far off, you shine,
Not what you must be ere you could be mine,
That which would crown despair if it were won.
Shaw set this poem to music, and it was published in To-day in September 1886.
In a second poem titled “Bewitched,” Edith referred to Shaw’s “white malign face” but she changed this to “dark malign face” in order to conceal his identity. This poem includes the lines:
I hate you until we are parted,
And ache till I meet you again!
Edith appeared to long for revenge:
Could I know that your world was just I—
And could laugh in your eyes and refuse you,
And love you and hate you and die!
Yet she denied that her poetry drew on her own experiences and insisted: “Right or wrong I could never bring myself to lay my soul naked before the public. My published poems are nearly all dramatic lyrics.”66
Edith realized Shaw was withdrawing, but she still valued his opinion as a critic and asked him to review Lays and Legends, her first collection of poems. He explained that, as he was finishing An Unsocial Socialist, he could do nothing before December and only then if she were “hard pressed for it.” He asked if he might “read the book for pure pleasure.” Before he received it, he sent her a playful yet insightful mock review:
The author has a fair ear, writes with remarkable facility and with some grace, and occasionally betrays an incisive but shrewish insight. On the other hand, she is excessively conventional; and her ideas are not a woman’s ideas, but the ideas which men have foisted, in their own interest, on women. It is needless to add that she is never original; and it is probable that if she ever writes a sincere poem, she will suppress it.67
In an unsolicited and, ultimately, unpublished review he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, Shaw declared “the book is eloquent and talks to you, sometimes like an angry and unreasonable wife, sometimes like a restless and too sensitive girl, often like a noblehearted and intelligent woman.”68
It is unclear if Hubert knew of the relationship between Edith and Shaw. Given his persistent infidelity, he had little justification for feeling aggrieved. Yet when he happened upon them in the British Museum one day, Shaw described him as looking “rather sulky.” Certainly he maintained a friendship with Shaw, with whom he had much in common. In one fascinating letter, Shaw congratulated Hubert and himself on a shared determination to write rather than follow the “sacred second-hand principles” that obliged men to pursue lucrative careers. He did acknowledge that this obliged his mother and Hubert’s “clever and interesting wife” to earn a living.69
Although Edith continued to meet Shaw at the British Museum, he grew distinctly cooler. In May 1887 he reacted angrily when she insisted on accompanying him home. “My mother was out, and she went away after an unpleasant scene caused by my telling her that I wished her to go, as I was afraid that a visit to me alone would compromise her,” he wrote in his diary on May 11, 1887.70 They did meet occasionally that summer, but generally in the company of others. By September Shaw had stopped writing at the British Museum, since he found it “impossible to work amid acquaintances who kept constantly coming to chat with me.” He did return on September 30 “to hunt up some information for Mrs Bland.”71
In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Daphne declares of her relationship with Mr. Henry:
“It is all over. Thank God, I do not love him any more!” “But, oh,” she told herself, “if only he would love me again, and try once again to make me love him! That is what I really want. That’s what would make the world really good again. If only I could hurt him as he hurt me. What’s the use of my not loving him when I can’t tell him so?”72
Shaw always played down the significance of their relationship, but he conceded that Edith had talked of leaving Hubert for him. “No two people were ever married who were better calculated to make the worst of each other,” he told Doris Langley Moore.73 Edith was not the only one who put her life into her fiction. “If a man is a deep writer,” Shaw proclaimed, “all his works are confessions.”74 Nowhere is this more evident than in An Unfinished Novel, written during the summer of 1887. Although Shaw insisted he had abandoned it “from want of time,” it seems more likely that his thinly disguised critique of the Bland marriage was dangerously revelatory.75
In the preface he wrote six decades later, he declared “the lover is the hero and the husband only the wife’s mistake.”76 The Maddicks are a discontented husband and wife, parents to three young children, who endure a fraught relationship exacerbated by genteel poverty. Dr. Maddick, who is a surrogate for Hubert, is vain and conceited, a flashy dresser and a flirt. His enigmatic, athletic wife, who is young, freckled, and more beautiful on examination than on first sight, wears an expression of “suppressed resentment and quick intelligence.”77 Although she is “imperfectly educated,” she makes up for this by being a voracious reader. Kincaid, the young doctor who enters their lives, is, like Shaw, rigorous in keeping “a record of his movements.” He is attracted by the intensity and variety of Mrs. Maddick’s emotions—“her restless suspicion, her shyness, her audacity, her impulsive frankness, her insatiable curiosity, base jealousy and vulgar envy.”78
When Mrs. Maddick asks Kincaid if he believes in love at first sight, he demurs. “I am not in love,” he insists, “and so . . . the subject bores me.” “I wish you would discuss it with me,” she persists.79 In a telling exchange, she explains:
“Mr Maddick and I open one another’s letters because we have perfect confidence in one another.” He started at her voice: rage, tears, and defiance were struggling in it. He looked up, and saw that her large eyes were wet, and her cheeks red.80
When Kincaid wonders why they don’t use alternative addresses, she responds: “He does; but I do not,” and explains:
“There are reasons why a man should open his wife’s letters—at least he would if he were half a man. Some men are not. I should despise my husband if he cared so little for himself and for me as to let me get what letters I pleased.”81
It would seem that Edith hoped for more commitment from Shaw, but he hid behind his “scruples” and insisted that he was reluctant to cuckold his friends or lead women “into trouble.”82 Yet his entanglements were generally with married women. “I was not attracted by virgins as such,” he explained in Sixteen Self Sketches:
I preferred fully matured women who knew what they were doing. All my pursuers did not want sexual intercourse. Some were happily married, and appreciated our understanding that sex was barred. They wanted Sunday husbands, and plenty of them. Some were prepared to buy friendship with pleasure, having learnt from a varied experience that men are made that way. Some were enchantresses, quite unbearable as housemates. No two cases were alike.83
George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irishwoman, fellow Fabian and champion of women’s rights, on June 1, 1898.* Naturally, he considered himself captured prey that had been pounced on when at his most vulnerable: “I should never have married at all,” he told Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, “if I had not been dead at the time.”84 He had fallen off his bicycle and agreed to recuperate in her home. In truth, they got on terribly well. According to Beatrice Webb, they were “constant companions, pedalling round the country all day, sitting up late at night talking.”85
Shaw wrote of Charlotte:
She, being also Irish, does not succumb to my arts as the unsuspecting and literal Englishwoman does; but we get on together all the better, repairing bicycles, talking philosophy and religion . . . or, when we are in a mischievous or sentimental humour, philandering shamelessly and outrageously.
When it came to sex, they reached a mutually satisfactory understanding:
As man and wife we found a new relation in which sex had no part. It ended the old gallantries, flirtations, and philanderings for both of us. Even of those it was the ones that were never consummated that left the longest and kindliest memories.86
* She was related to Thomas Courtney Townshend, Shaw’s old employer in Dublin.