Bernard Shaw (michael Holroyd) - Set Of 3 Volumes (chatto & Windus, 1991)

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To celebrate the publication of the third and final volume of Michael Holroyd's "Bernard Shaw", a boxed set is available of first editions of all three volumes: "The Search for Love", "The Pursuit of Power" and "The Lure of Fantasy". To his own generation Bernard Shaw's greatest creation seemed to be himself. Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist and irresistible charmer, he was the most controversial literary figure of his age and the scourge of all that was most oppressive in late-Victorian England. In his writing and public speeches, he embodied the unfamiliar virtues of reason, sense and unanswerable good humor. And yet, as the opening volume of this masterly three-volume biography makes clear, Shaw's invention of this monumental figure was a paradoxical method of concealment and his way of coming to terms with a world that had abandoned him in childhood. The Mephistophelean Irishman brought to the creation of "G.B.S." the same vitality and delight that he devoted to his plays and to his innumerable causes, from the rights of women to the promotion of "hygienic" dress. With sympathetic insight Michael Holroyd takes us back to "Sonny," the child who was reluctant father to this Superman. Shaw's career was greatly influenced by his upbringing in Ireland. His early days in Dublin had been "rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities." The last of a long line of increasingly impoverished Anglo-Irish gentry, he grew up in a curiously unsettling menage-a-trois. His father, George Carr Shaw, was a redundant civil servant who had turned to drink; his mother became the right-hand woman for a Svengali-like teacher, George Vandeleur Lee. Fearing that he might have been illegitimate, Shaw later dropped the name George as the symbol of his uncertainty and set out to find a new and invulnerable identity. In The Search for Love, Michael Holroyd takes Shaw from his birth in 1856, through a series of poignant and tantalizing love affairs, to his marriage in 1898. Following his mother to London, he attempted to set himself up as a professional man of genius. He tried his hand at novels; elected himself a leading member of the Fabian Society; established a reputation, with his championship of Wagner, as a brilliant music critic; and composed his famous "pleasant" and "unpleasant" plays. In a crowded social life he collaborated with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, played amorous piano duets with Annie Besant, spent his evenings with May Morris and Eleanor Marx, and contributed to the newspapers of Frank Harris. Two strands in his character, love and power, competed over his affection for Ellen Terry and his struggle with Henry Irving. Michael Holroyd counterpoints the private and public Shaw with humor, compassion and originality. Listening to the subtle mind behind Shaw's laughter and divesting G.B.S. of his pantomime clothing, he reveals the man who orphaned himself from his parents to become the child of his own writings. In The Search for Love subject and author are perfectly matched. The result promises to be one of the great literary biographies of our times.
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Bernard Shaw (michael Holroyd) - Set Of 3 Volumes (chatto & Windus, 1991)

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