Shaw’s Early Writings: A Prologue to the Playwright

Abstract

Richard Farr Dietrich evaluates Shaw’s earliest works, the at-first-unpublished My Dear Dorothea and the unfinished Passion Play, followed by Shaw’s five completed novels and some short stories typical of his early writing. Dietrich explains how Shaw fictionalized the conflict between his own desire for marriage with a soul mate and his passion for “world betterment,” which he feared would be thwarted through marriage. Misalliance had been his experience within his own family, and so the fear of it is mirrored in this early writing, except comically, most often, to laugh it away.