Social critic, major playwright, self-proclaimed genius, sexual adventurer, fanatical vegetarian, George Bernard Shaw was a kind of literary Superman in late Victorian England, a precursor of Pound and Eliot who helped blaze the trail for modernism. He was also a repressed homosexual. So argues Sally Peters, a lecturer at Wesleyan University, in this adventurous study of buried feminine and homoerotic themes in Shaw's life and work. Whether one agrees or disagrees with her thesis, Peters has produced a fascinating exploration of the man who lived life in pursuit of "the satisfaction of a passion in us of which we can give no rational account whatever."


From Publishers Weekly
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was haunted by the idea that he was a reincarnation of William Shakespeare. According to Peters's startlingly incisive biographical study, full of fresh insights, Shaw saw himself as in many ways the idealized "superman" of his plays?the heroic artist as moral, powerful and courageous outsider. Yet Shaw, who hated hypocrisy, was, in Peters's estimate, an arch-hypocrite, touted as a feminist while he played women off each other in triangular relationships and used the threat of physical violence to assert control over his mistress, Irish widow Jane Patterson, whom he "pretended to throw out of (a) window" (in the words of Shaw's diary). Peters, a visiting lecturer at Wesleyan, says Shaw's unconsummated marriage to Charlotte Payne-Townshend was "a protective but sterile womb" and traces his misogyny to overidentification with his cold, selfish mother, who dumped Shaw's drunkard father. She illuminates the vegetarian, teetotaling playwright's obsessions, including his devotion to boxing and mountain climbing and his preference for unbleached, knitted wool clothing. Preaching eugenics, seeking spiritual salvation, Shaw projected his romanticized self-image onto the stage in telling parables for humanity. Photos. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The appearance of yet another book on Shaw testifies to his fascination for both academics and the public. Shaw's life and work have been carefully documented, studied, and analyzed in the last decade, but Peters (a visiting lecturer at Wesleyan) brings another questioning eye to the exploration of the ambiguities and passions that formed this great playwright and thinker. Shaw's sexuality, always a good topic of speculation, is studied here, but one wishes for more insights and in-depth analysis. Peters does devote a chapter to Shaw's close relationship with the actor and playwright Harley Granville Barker, mainly from Shaw's point of view. One may not agree with Peters's conclusions, but they will prove to be of interest to anyone studying Shaw. Recommended for theater collections and academic libraries. (Index and photographs not seen.)?Susan L. Peters, Emory Univ. Lib., AtlantaCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
Sally Peters would penetrate parts of George Bernard Shaw other analysts have unaccountably failed to reach.


From Booklist
Peters' study of behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that Shaw cloaked in secrecy and silence is likely to interest readers receptive to her eclectic approach--"using everything from existential phenomenology to popular culture to track down clues" --and curious about her subject's place in what Peters calls "the raucous nineteenth-century battle that pitted genetic inheritance against the power of individual will." The author, a liberal studies lecturer at Wesleyan University, incorporates biographical details and probing analyses of Shaw's complex, often ambivalent relationships with both men and women from childhood through old age in concluding that he "accepted responsibility for the genius and homosexuality that he believed to be his twin inheritance, creating his own sense of values, giving meaning to his life." Mary Carroll


From Kirkus Reviews
A tendentious, trendy reading of Shaw, with an entirely speculative theory of secret homosexuality. Examining Shaw's literary ambitions, his passionate yet finally celibate romanticism, and his ostentatiously ascetic lifestyle, Peters (a visiting scholar at Wesleyan Univ.) ostensibly disavows Freudianism but nonetheless takes up its assumptions of suppressed meanings and motives--which only a critic can decipher. Suspicious of the mercurial Shaw, Peters is rightly skeptical about his evasions concerning his shabby-genteel childhood and drunken father, and his protestations of his mother's virtue despite her affair with a Dublin musical impresario. Peters finds in Shaw an ambitious personality given early on to self-deception and dissimulation: a pathologically deluding figure as an embryonic artistic genius in need of a corroborative ideology. The author scrutinizes Shaw's interest in evolution and eugenics in his formulation of his theory of the Life Force and the Superman. She claims the influence on him of sexologists of the period--such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis--trying to trap Shaw in the paradox that he could not be either artist or degenerate without being both; thus he had to write in code and to adopt eccentrically austere habits, such as vegetarianism and celibacy, to keep himself in check. Although Peters selectively cites Shaw's diaries and correspondence as reflections of his interior struggle, she renders her argument in either windy rhetoric--Shaw's ``ethereal'' vs. his ``fiery'' natures, his masculine/dynamic vs. his feminine/passive aspects--or gender-criticism jargon, e.g., her critique of his epistolary love affair with Ellen Terry. Riding the current academic hobbyhorses, including gender reversal and ``the gaze,'' Peters offers a rhetorically overloaded version of Shaw's life and work. (29 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
In this critical biography of the man hailed as the second greatest playwright in the English language, Sally Peters explores Shaw`s background and beliefs, interests and obsessions, relations with men and women, and prose writings and dramatic art, and she reveals that he had a convoluted and extravagant inner life studded with erotic secrets.


From the Author
When I first began investigating Shaw's life, he seemed an insoluble enigma. I came to his life as a drama critic who had analyzed his plays and become caught up in their vital energy. I wondered how he managed to create those plays. How did he transform the mundane material of an inauspicious life into enduring works of art? If environment, circumstance, and heredity are determining factors, then Shaw should have lived and died a clerk in Dublin. Instead he became the second greatest playwright in the English language .Certainly life and art are not to be equated, but the two are intimately connected. Who was this Bernard Shaw and what was the connection between his life and art? To answer that question took me close to two decades. It is the peculiar spinning out of the life history, the weaving of the personal life myth that fascinates. Yet it is the realm of everyday life that offers a pathway into secret spheres, including the labyrinthian psyche of the great creative artist. To probe the mystery of man and artist, I forged my own method, using everything from existential phenomenology to popular culture to track down clues. I investigated all the themes and passions of Shaw's life- from wool-wearing and eugenics, ghost-writing and boxing, to socialism and Shakespeare-baiting. I wanted to uncover what they meant to Shaw. Shaw's psychic landscape proved far more convoluted than I ever imagined. From the theme of Shaw's feminism emerged his ambivalent relationships with women. Investigation of those themes led, finally, to his ambivalent relationships with men. I found a pattern of evidence that suggests that Shaw thought of himself, as he thought of Shakespeare, as a "noble invert"-an ascetic artist/genius-whose gifts were linked to a homoerotic source. Obviously how one views oneself may be at odds with the world at large. (Because I report Shaw's claim that he was the reincarnation of Shakespeare does not mean I think he was ) .At the dawn of the twenty-first century, there is no agreement on whether self-definition-even with emotional commitment to one of the same gender-is sufficient for a cultural recognition of sexual identity. But for Shaw, immersed in the vastly conflicting theories of heredity and geniius, gender and sexology of his time, the cultural climate of sexual ambiguity and private revelation mirrored his own uncertainties. Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman charts Shaw's rich interior life, including his struggle to recognize and accept the secret identity that he believed to be both his inheritance and his destiny. In piecing together the kaleidoscopic mosaic of Shaw's "world design," the pattern formed by his life choices, I found a powerful ascending trajectory. Possessed of monumental energy,championing will even as he insisted that he was a born artist/genius, he was in many ways a dazzling imitation of his wished-for superman. Above all, my book presents the triumphant story of an artist and his quest.


About the Author
Sally Peters has written extensively on drama, dance, and cultural history. Her biography of Shaw, a Choice Outstanding Academic Book, has earned her honors from the Bernard Shaw Society of North America and the American Irish Historical Society. Previously at Yale University, she is currently a professor in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program, Wesleyan University.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this critical biography, Sally Peters explores Shaw's background and beliefs, interests and obsessions, relations with men and women, prose writings and dramatic art. In deciphering the enigma that was Shaw, she uncovers a convoluted and extravagant inner life studded with erotic secrets. Peters examines the passions of Shaw's life - everything from vegetarianism and boxing to socialism and feminism - and pieces them together in a new configuration, offering a fresh interpretation of his life and works. Striving unceasingly to ascend, possessed of monumental energy, Shaw was in many ways a dazzling example of his idealized superman. But, says Peters, this superman was also a man haunted by phantoms, a man of gender ambivalences and romantic yearnings, and a man who championed will even while believing that his erotic inclinations were the secret mark of the born artist. Throughout, he was braced by a resilient comic vision as he transformed his life into enduring art.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was haunted by the idea that he was a reincarnation of William Shakespeare. According to Peters's startlingly incisive biographical study, full of fresh insights, Shaw saw himself as in many ways the idealized "superman" of his plays-the heroic artist as moral, powerful and courageous outsider. Yet Shaw, who hated hypocrisy, was, in Peters's estimate, an arch-hypocrite, touted as a feminist while he played women off each other in triangular relationships and used the threat of physical violence to assert control over his mistress, Irish widow Jane Patterson, whom he "pretended to throw out of (a) window" (in the words of Shaw's diary). Peters, a visiting lecturer at Wesleyan, says Shaw's unconsummated marriage to Charlotte Payne-Townshend was "a protective but sterile womb" and traces his misogyny to overidentification with his cold, selfish mother, who dumped Shaw's drunkard father. She illuminates the vegetarian, teetotaling playwright's obsessions, including his devotion to boxing and mountain climbing and his preference for unbleached, knitted wool clothing. Preaching eugenics, seeking spiritual salvation, Shaw projected his romanticized self-image onto the stage in telling parables for humanity. Photos. (Mar.)

Library Journal

The appearance of yet another book on Shaw testifies to his fascination for both academics and the public. Shaw's life and work have been carefully documented, studied, and analyzed in the last decade, but Peters (a visiting lecturer at Wesleyan) brings another questioning eye to the exploration of the ambiguities and passions that formed this great playwright and thinker. Shaw's sexuality, always a good topic of speculation, is studied here, but one wishes for more insights and in-depth analysis. Peters does devote a chapter to Shaw's close relationship with the actor and playwright Harley Granville Barker, mainly from Shaw's point of view. One may not agree with Peters's conclusions, but they will prove to be of interest to anyone studying Shaw. Recommended for theater collections and academic libraries. (Index and photographs not seen.)-Susan L. Peters, Emory Univ. Lib., Atlanta

BookList - Mary Carroll

Peters' study of behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that Shaw cloaked in secrecy and silence is likely to interest readers receptive to her eclectic approach--"using everything from existential phenomenology to popular culture to track down clues" --and curious about her subject's place in what Peters calls "the raucous nineteenth-century battle that pitted genetic inheritance against the power of individual will." The author, a liberal studies lecturer at Wesleyan University, incorporates biographical details and probing analyses of Shaw's complex, often ambivalent relationships with both men and women from childhood through old age in concluding that he "accepted responsibility for the genius and homosexuality that he believed to be his twin inheritance, creating his own sense of values, giving meaning to his life."

Kirkus Reviews

A tendentious, trendy reading of Shaw, with an entirely speculative theory of secret homosexuality.

Examining Shaw's literary ambitions, his passionate yet finally celibate romanticism, and his ostentatiously ascetic lifestyle, Peters (a visiting scholar at Wesleyan Univ.) ostensibly disavows Freudianism but nonetheless takes up its assumptions of suppressed meanings and motives—which only a critic can decipher. Suspicious of the mercurial Shaw, Peters is rightly skeptical about his evasions concerning his shabby-genteel childhood and drunken father, and his protestations of his mother's virtue despite her affair with a Dublin musical impresario. Peters finds in Shaw an ambitious personality given early on to self-deception and dissimulation: a pathologically deluding figure as an embryonic artistic genius in need of a corroborative ideology. The author scrutinizes Shaw's interest in evolution and eugenics in his formulation of his theory of the Life Force and the Superman. She claims the influence on him of sexologists of the period—such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis—trying to trap Shaw in the paradox that he could not be either artist or degenerate without being both; thus he had to write in code and to adopt eccentrically austere habits, such as vegetarianism and celibacy, to keep himself in check. Although Peters selectively cites Shaw's diaries and correspondence as reflections of his interior struggle, she renders her argument in either windy rhetoric—Shaw's "ethereal" vs. his "fiery" natures, his masculine/dynamic vs. his feminine/passive aspects—or gender-criticism jargon, e.g., her critique of his epistolary love affair with Ellen Terry.

Riding the current academic hobbyhorses, including gender reversal and "the gaze," Peters offers a rhetorically overloaded version of Shaw's life and work.