12 - The later Shaw

Summary

In 1923, Shaw wrote Saint Joan, which he called “A Chronicle,” a description that he had never previously given to a play. The play was performed with great success, first in New York in December 1923 and in London in the following year. Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for 1925 (despite his well-known aversion to such awards), and, although the prize was given for the entire corpus of a writer's contribution to literature, there can be little doubt that the judges were greatly influenced by the success of Saint Joan. After Saint Joan Shaw did not write another play for five years. In 1924, however, his sister-in-law Mrs. Mary Cholmondeley, asked him to send her “a few of your ideas of Socialism.” She wanted the notes for a study circle in her home county of Shropshire. This was when the Soviet Union had come into being and Britain had had her first Labor government. Shaw threw himself into the task with energy and enthusiasm. He said that he enjoyed the exercise because it was “real brain work, not romancing and inventing but reasoning hard” and “a real hard literary job, all brains instead of writing plays.” Exasperatingly, the work proved more demanding than he had expected. Originally planned as a booklet of about 50,000 words, it ended as a large volume of well over 200,000 words. The book was finally published in 1928 with the title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.