• Irish comic, dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist

• Winner of Nobel prize in literature in 1925

• Shaw first started out in literature by writing fiction, but wasn’t very successful.
• First novel --> Immaturity; semi-autobiographical, rejected by many publishers.
Next four fictional works and newspaper articles he submitted were also similarly
rejected. An Unfinished Novel --> written 1887, final false start in fiction.
• Wrote fiction during the 80s. Found himself then, even though he wasn’t successful
at fiction. Started venturing into drama.
• 4 th January, 1884 --> founded the Fabian Society. The Fabian Society derives its
name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius, known for his strategy of delaying
his attacks on the invading Carthaginians until the right moment.
• Many prominent left wing thinkers of the Victorian era were a part - Beatrice and
Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier, G.B. Shaw, Annie Besant.
• Fabians founded the Labour Party in 1900.
• Beatrice and Sidney Webb were most significant in developing the ideas that would
come to characterise Fabian thinking and in developing the thorough research
methodology that remains a feature of the Society to the present day. Both
prodigious authors, Beatrice and Sidney wrote extensively on a wide range of topics,
but it was Beatrice’s 1909 Minority Report to the Commission of the Poor Law that
was perhaps their most remembered contribution.
• The London School of Economics (A bequest of £20,000 left by Derby Fabian Henry
Hutchinson to the Society for “propaganda and other purposes” was used by the
Webbs, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw to found a research institute)
holds the Fabian Society archives including extensive correspondence and early
photographs of Fabian Society events. It is also home to the Fabian window, a
stained-glass image of early Fabians, designed by George Bernard Shaw. The New
Statesman – started by the Webbs.
• Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of one
of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to which he
also contributed two sections.
• 1890s: Shaw started out writing plays by trying to write modern, realistic drama
which was expected by the viewers of the time. Henrik Ibsen’s plays were popular in
theatres of the time – The Doll’s House and Ghosts. These brought a new style
unlike the conventional plots within the genre.
• 1891 – The Quintessence of Ibsenism. extended analysis of the works of Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen and of Ibsen's critical reception in England. By extension,
Shaw uses this "exposition of Ibsenism"[1] to illustrate the imperfections of British
 society, notably employing to that end an imaginary "community of a thousand
persons," divided into three categories: Philistines, Idealists, and the lone Realist.
• The essay originated in response to a call for papers from the Fabian Society in the
spring of 1890, "put forward under the general heading 'Socialism in Contemporary
Literature.'
• The Unpleasant Plays:
o Widower’s House – ironic comedy; against notorious slum landlordism in
London. A young gentleman discovers his and his father’s fortune resulted
out of extortion of the poor.
o Mrs. Warren’s Profession – refused a license by the Lord Chamberlain,
censor of plays, because it was about organized prostitution. Action turns on
the discovery by a well-educated young woman that her mother has
graduated through the “profession” to become a part proprietor of brothels
throughout Europe. Again, the economic determinants of the situation are
emphasized, and the subject is treated remorselessly and without the
titillation of fashionable comedies about “fallen women.”
o Shaw called these first plays “unpleasant,” because “their dramatic power is
used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.”
• The Pleasant Plays:
o Arms and the Man - makes lighthearted, though sometimes mordant, fun of
romantic falsifications of both love and warfare.
o Candida - The play represents its heroine as forced to choose between her
clerical husband—a worthy but obtuse Christian socialist—and a young poet
who has fallen wildly in love with her. Similar themes to man and superman,
but only lightly touched upon.
o Man and Superman - it leads on to that of the conflict between man as
spiritual creator and woman as guardian of the biological continuity of the
human race that is basic to a later play.
o You Can Never Tell – also similar themes.
o Pleasant plays written to gain back the favour of those he’d angered with his
unpleasant plays.
• Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898)
• Three Plays for Puritans (1901):
o The Devil’s Disciple - play set in New Hampshire during the American
Revolution and is an inversion of traditional melodrama.
o Caesar and Cleopatra - In the play Cleopatra is a spoiled and vicious 16-
year-old child rather than the 38-year-old temptress of Shakespeare’s
 Antony and Cleopatra. The play depicts Caesar as a lonely and austere man
who is as much a philosopher as he is a soldier. The play’s outstanding
success rests upon its treatment of Caesar as a credible study in
magnanimity and “original morality” rather than as a superhuman hero on a
stage pedestal.
o Captain Brassbound’s Conversion - sermon against various kinds of folly
masquerading as duty and justice.
• Pygmalion - It was claimed by Shaw to be a didactic drama about phonetics, and its
antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a phonetician, but the play is a humane comedy
about love and the English class system.
• Shaw’s New Woman:
o Concept also appeared in works of Hardy, Henry Higgins, and H. G. Wells
o Woman with iconoclastic views and behaviours – independent woman
seeking radical change (intro’d by Sarah Grand in 1894)
o Independence was not simply a matter of the mind; it also involved physical
changes in activity and dress, as activities such as bicycling expanded
women's ability to engage with a broader, more active world.
o Term popularized by Henry James through works such as Daisy Miller and
Portrait of a Lady, which feature new women characters.
o The New Woman was inducted into the early and middle plays of Shaw. His
woman characters set a new trend by challenging the male authority and
attempting to remake the world created by men. We find him clearly
protesting the Victorian ideal of feminity in glorifying the unfeminine woman
and championing the woman who is clever, and independent. He eventually
conceived an ideal for a woman who was both equal to man and
simultaneously uniquely feminine.
o Liberation through independence – social, economic, and psychological.
o Shaw protested romanticizing women, not putting them on a pedestal, but
understanding the role they played and were meant to play.
o Eliza Dolittle: Eliza has been portrayed as a typical Victorian woman,
conscious of her womanly feelings and passions.The story of Pygmalion is
the story of the making of a woman. She devotes herself completely to her
creator in order to be a perfect creation. But, she rebels against Higgins
when he is indifferent to her sincerity. She repudiates the notion that all
women want to be mastered and asserts her own individuality. She wants
natural love not somebody to bully her. She understands the wretchedness
of being an experimental object. She becomes aware of her loss of identity –
 she can no longer sell flowers because of her accent, and cannot be a true
woman of the high society because she is faking.
o Mrs. Warren: unconventional fall of a woman. Shaw goes against the
Victorian prudishness against prostitution (his is one of the only works that
even discuss this subject openly). Mrs. Warren is constantly shamed and
shunned by society, but doesn’t let any of it affect her. She is satisfied with
her profession and is not ashamed or conscience-stricken. She isn’t selfish
in choosing to stay in her profession, but is constantly thinking about others
such as her daughter – uses the money to give her the best education
possible. Shaw shows how women can balance career, family, and social
life with absolutely no issues.

“I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and I was slave- driven until I
cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I was a good mother, and because I made my
daughter a good woman, she turns me out as if I was a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live
over again!..I’d do wrong and nothing but wrong and prosper on it.” (Act V)

Barbara Bellow Watson very rightly says about Shaw in her essay on The New Woman and
the New Comedy, The trick is Shaw’s creation of a long list of interesting characters who
happen to be females and that contribution alone should make him a patron saint of the
woman’s movement. Beginning nearly a hundred years ago with the independent and
intelligent women in his novels and continuing through his last plays, Shaw turned out a
distinctive product ,the Shavian Woman the quintessence of the New Woman.