Fülszöveg
MRS. G. B. S.: A PORTRAIT
by Janet Dunbar
"It has been a shock," wrote George Bernard Shaw after his wife's death in 1943. "I lived with Charlotte for forty years, and I see now that there was a great deal about her that I didn't know.''
Shaw was charmed by Charlotte when he first met her, as she was by him, and yet he railed and stormed against her, exaggerated every aspect of their relationship, and wrote to Ellen Terry that "the green-eyed Irish millionairess,' in desperation for marriage, at last proposed to him. Despite Shaw's characteristic hyperbole, their friendship progressed into a deeper affection, and two years after their first meeting they were married. They lived together for forty years in this atmosphere of affection and mutual respect, and yet when she died, G.B.S. discovered that he had hardly known this woman.
He was not alone in this respect, for although there is a great deal of material available on Shaw, very little has been revealed about Charlotte—and...
Tovább
Fülszöveg
MRS. G. B. S.: A PORTRAIT
by Janet Dunbar
"It has been a shock," wrote George Bernard Shaw after his wife's death in 1943. "I lived with Charlotte for forty years, and I see now that there was a great deal about her that I didn't know.''
Shaw was charmed by Charlotte when he first met her, as she was by him, and yet he railed and stormed against her, exaggerated every aspect of their relationship, and wrote to Ellen Terry that "the green-eyed Irish millionairess,' in desperation for marriage, at last proposed to him. Despite Shaw's characteristic hyperbole, their friendship progressed into a deeper affection, and two years after their first meeting they were married. They lived together for forty years in this atmosphere of affection and mutual respect, and yet when she died, G.B.S. discovered that he had hardly known this woman.
He was not alone in this respect, for although there is a great deal of material available on Shaw, very little has been revealed about Charlotte—and that, little more often than not, mistaken. She has been described variously as a shrew and as a cow—on the one hand, tiresomely goading the great man; on the other, smothering him with her domesticity— and as a lonely and unattractive old spinster who trapped him into an impossible marriage. But Charlotte Shaw, as Miss Dunbar points out, was an entirely different person—charming, sensitive, intelligent, with an inner passion that was revealed in her lifetime to only two people, Axel Munthe and T. E. Lawrence.
This is a book which will delight all collectors of Shaviana, for it reveals a side of G.B.S. that has all too rarely been discussed—Shaw the married man, who dictated his wife's replies to the love letters that were sent to him. But more than that, this is the story of a person who was fascinating in her own right, outside of the fact that she was married to one of the most formidable figures in English literature.
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