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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1885, on his twenty-ninth birthday, George Bernard Shaw slept with a woman for the first time. The woman's name was Jenny Patterson; she was a close friend of his mother's, and not much younger. "I was an absolute novice," Shaw later wrote in his diary. "I did not take the initiative in the matter." Although Shaw found the experience "potent," it also, as his biographer Michael Holroyd notes, "unShavianized him." Sex and its attendant emotional intimacies, Holroyd adds, "robbed him of his authority and the hard discipline of work through which he was trying to re-create himself." Indeed, as time went on Shaw began to believe that passion was best expressed through letters to the beloved, which is to say through the imagination.
As he backed off from direct engagement with the opposite sex, his view of women in his work began to seem remarkably consistent. Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Major Barbara, Mrs. Warren's daughter, and Eliza Doolittle: in all these characters, Shaw showed us women who were engaged in a spiritual quest, fighting to rise above the limitations of their flesh. Nowhere in Shaw's enormous body of work did this theme play out more dramatically than in his 1932 book, "The Adventures...
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