Introduction

Abstract

This book considers the interior authors of Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf and examines the nexus of modernism and censorship in one facet of their respective plays and novels: their creation of characters who either self-censor their own work or who are censored by their fellow characters. Against the dialectic of censorship and modernism that shaped the work of Shaw and Woolf, their fictional authors may be considered as reflections of their creators and their milieu. Additionally, in many instances, these Shavian and Woolfian authors mirror a more personal aspect of these renowned writers: their preoccupation with their authorial selves, especially in relation to other writers, as each play or novel examines the artist’s responsibility as a creator, as an establisher of order, or as a reformer of morals (John A. Bertolini, The Playwriting Self of Bernard Shaw.

Introduction

Virginia Woolf famously asserted that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” She further maintained that “The first signs of it [this change] are recorded in the books of Samuel Butler [1835–1902], in The Way of All Flesh in particular; the plays of Bernard Shaw continue to record it” (WE iii, 421–22; emphasis mine).¹ Thus, Woolf proclaimed Shaw a modern. She suggested that although an essential part of living included acting as a judge of character, she acknowledged that creating credible characters in fiction is a different proposition altogether. While castigating the previous generation of novelists (in her terms, “the Edwardians”) for their failure to meet this artistic challenge by concentrating mostly on narrative detail, Woolf lamented that “one line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description” (WE iii, 429). Woolf had already expressed her views on the topic in her 1924 foundational essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (E iii, 384), where she stated that it is the job of the Georgian (her contemporary) writer to advance the art of character development: “… it is from the gleams and flashes of this flying spirit that he must create a solid, living, … Mrs. Brown.” Woolf concluded that although the lady still escaped the writer, she expected that her generation, the moderns, were closer than ever to capturing her (WE iii, 388).

Woolf’s pronouncement about this change in human character, especially her audacity in dating it specifically, has become a provocative topic for Woolf scholars, who have debated about her possible motives: Woolf began writing novels in 1910; King Edward VII died and George V ascended the throne; and her friend Roger Fry mounted the block-buster Post-Impressionist Exhibit that year. However, most germane to this study is the reaction of Woolf scholars to her recognition of the prescience of Bernard Shaw as an arbiter of the change in character in his contemporary dramas. Shaw? they ask. There must be some mistake—surely Woolf did not mean that old Edwardian writer of prefaces and overlong plays, when Misalliance, by Woolf’s own admission, was painful to endure in 1910 (WL I, 423)?²

In a 2014 book devoted to interpreting Woolf’s pronouncement about 1910, prominent Woolf scholars take issue with her choice of Shaw as an illustrative example of one who recognized and began to capture the change in human character. For example, Elizabeth Abel labels Shaw “unremarkable” and therefore unworthy of representing Woolf’s innovative ideas about the creation of human character.³ Peter Stansky reminds us that Woolf “was a very witty person and that the remark … was also said somewhat tongue in cheek.” Stansky notes that Misalliance was playing in 1910 and that both Shaw’s Candida and Arms and the Man were published that year and were in the Woolf library.⁴ Maria Di Battista terms Shaw’s rebellion against Edwardian moral certainty and complacency a kind of modernist insolence, such as that found in Shaw’s Hypatia in Misalliance, the impudent young woman who longs to be “an active verb.” Di Battista suggests that this “longing,” which she also finds in Shaw’s Getting Married, only calls attention to the problem of lack of opportunities for women but fails to provide antidotes that produce actual change.⁵ She neglects to note that Shaw creates an active foil to Hypatia’s longing spirit, Lina Szczepanowska, a genuine active verb, who does not wait to be asked but initiates her own participation in her family’s business and culture.⁶

Writing in Virginia Woolf and the Real World, Alex Zwerdling considers several plays by Shaw as offering glimpses of anti-Victorian hope for the future of family life. He even labels several of Shaw’s female characters as “new women,” that is, women who treasure their independence and give enlightened accounts of their roles in the modern family. However, Zwerdling goes on to dismiss Shaw’s place in Woolf’s equation of the change in human character: “In … Shaw one need only stand a received idea on its head to set it right…. The stance can create neither mature nor highly original work.” Presumably Zwerdling refers to characters such as Hypatia, who only verbalizes her longing for action in the play. However, he provides a preface to his analysis of Shaw’s new women, whom he identifies as Vivie Warren (an actuarial accountant in Mrs. Warren’s Profession), Lesbia Grantham (“an independent woman of England” in Getting Married), and Lena Szczepanowska (an aerialist and a gymnast in Misalliance, 249), who actually make their own sometimes unusual choices and who are determined not to lose the right to do so.⁷ These characters seemingly meet Zwerdling’s—and Woolf’s—criteria for characters who represent real change.

Hence Woolf chose Shaw as one of her exemplars in her quest to capture human character in fiction, and hence inextricably linked their names in the modernist pursuit of character development. Further exploration of the Shaw-Woolf relationship reveals that Woolf intuited Shaw’s insight into human character and greatly admired the dramatist who created that “active verb.” For Woolf, Shaw’s work comprised many more positive elements of the change in human character that she perceived than labels such as “unremarkable,” “mere debunking,” “literary insolence,” and “head-standing” would indicate.

Woolf may have gotten the idea of Shaw as a writer of Georgian substance from her revered Aunt Anny Ritchie during a visit to Ritchie’s home a few years before her death. Lady Ritchie, a writer herself, gave Shaw the following accolade: speaking of writers of Woolf’s father’s generation, she reasoned, “Some of them have just a touch of that [excellent] quality; Bernard Shaw has, but only a touch” (WD I, 248). Woolf’s husband Leonard also counted Shaw as one of his literary and political heroes during his early Cambridge years. In his autobiography, he writes, “We were passionately on the side of these champions [including Shaw] of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, of common sense and reason. We felt that, with them as our leaders, we were struggling against a religious and moral code of cant and hypocrisy.”⁸

Another indication that Woolf seriously considered Shaw a harbinger of insightful change is his escape from the drubbing she gave to other Edwardians in her renowned essays. The trio of prominent Edwardian writers, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett, are targets of Woolf’s sharp critique in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924) and their talent for character development is found seriously lacking—“their books are already a little chill, and must steadily grow more distant” (WE iii, 387). This group, again sans Shaw, feels the sting of Woolf’s pen in “Character in Fiction” and “Modern Fiction,” as she continues her attack on the prior generation whom she judges to have impeded the promising writers of her own era (WE iii, 420–38; iv, 157–64).

Of course, Shaw did not completely escape Woolf’s caustic pen: in letters she complained about his lengthy dramas, specifically Misalliance, and in personal encounters Shaw’s abundant vitality made the reserved Woolf long to escape his energetic conversation and his over-sized political views. However, these negative observations, largely personal and often colorful, seldom concern his art. Woolf wrote her remarks about the importance of 1910 in 1924 and contended that “Shaw’s plays continue to record” the change in human character. Although Misalliance was playing in 1910, numerous other plays by the prolific Shaw were staged between 1910 and the writing of Woolf’s essay, including three plays with prominent interior authors: Fanny’s First Play (1911), Back to Methuselah (1920), and Saint Joan (1923). The messages of those plays primarily concern women’s rights, Creative Evolution (the human life span), and woman-as-saint-and-hero respectively, and specifically describe their prescription for revolutionary change and clarity for the future of society and also for artistic character development. These three dramas are discussed in the chapters below and are among the works that bind Shaw and Woolf closer together as modernists seeking to portray human character effectively.

A Lover’s Part

Most accounts of the relationship between Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf (nee Stephen) focus on its biographical aspects, including their twenty-six-year age difference. After all, they once lived in the same house at 29 Fitzroy Square, Woolf and her brother Adrian having taken over the lease from Shaw and his mother in March 1907 (Fig. 1.1). Scholars often muse that the “ghost” of her predecessor did little to warm Woolf’s initial attitude toward Shaw: after seeing Misalliance, she called his mind “that of a disgustingly precious child.”⁹ Woolf, an irrepressible diarist, frequently recorded her early disdain for the famous playwright, and two of her novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Jacob’s Room (1922), seemingly cast Shaw’s political theories in an unfavorable light.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Woolf understood Shaw’s importance as a dramatist and felt a secret admiration for him, admitting that she was too timid to talk to him at a concert in 1915.¹¹

Fig. 1.1

29 Fitzroy Square (modern day). Virginia Stephen and her siblings took over the lease of this property from Bernard Shaw and his mother in 1907. Historical markers note that both famed authors lived at No. 29 at different times. (Alamy Photos)

Woolf and Shaw began to move in the same circles only after Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf, whose involvement in the Fabian Society grew out of his work on multinational cooperation and political allegiances (1915). The Fabian Research Committee, chaired by Shaw, commissioned Leonard to write a treatise on international government, which eventually led to the postwar League of Nations.¹² The association between the Woolfs and the Shaws deepened in due course, at lunches with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Fabian Society meetings, and other social gatherings, especially the storied Windham Crofts house party given by the Webbs in Sussex in 1916. Woolf recalls the event in her letters: they were “marching through woods with Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw, who all talked so incessantly upon so many different subjects that I never saw a single tree…. Still they were very kind” (WL ii, 101).¹³ The weekend impressed Shaw as well and became the basis for his much acclaimed play Heartbreak House (1917), with Virginia as a possible model for the younger Shotover daughter, the intriguing Ariadne. This country encounter ultimately resulted in a belated but mutual declaration of “love” between Shaw and Woolf twenty-four years later. However, Woolf confided that she would have dreaded the weekend except for bragging [about socializing with Shaw] (WL ii, 101).

This tempered admiration for the great dramatist continued even after the Webbs’s house party. Woolf refers to Shaw again in 1920 and includes a brief glimpse of the playwright in “Pictures and Portraits”: “Then there is Bernard Shaw…. a Don Quixote born in the northern mists—shrewd, that is to say, rather than romantic” (WE iii, 165). In 1922, Woolf’s diary entry relates an argument between Virginia and Leonard about Shaw, Leonard stating that society owed a great debt to Shaw and Virginia maintaining that he only influenced the outer fringes (WL, ii, 529). She offered another droll compliment to Shaw in her diary entry of June 3, 1932: “What life, what vitality—and why I don’t read him for pleasure” (WD iv, 107). However, her exasperation with the continued popularity of the Edwardians over the Georgians revealed itself in a letter to her sister Vanessa about the literary tastes of the latter’s children: “I only wish they didn’t both think Bernard Shaw greater than Shakespeare.”¹⁴ Stanley Weintraub notes that in return Shaw viewed Woolf’s fellow Georgians with disdain because they “challenged readers with what he called ‘blackguardly’ language to show their liberation from traditional restraints.” Yet Shaw complimented Woolf’s talent, if not her politics, in a letter to the editor of the Political Quarterly, which Shaw supported financially: “Since artistry is essential, all political notes should be written by Virginia Woolf;” at the time, he believed she had little interest in politics.¹⁵

However, the genuine admiration, even affection, between Shaw and Woolf had only smoldered until their correspondence in 1940 (Fig. 1.2), when Woolf wrote to Shaw inquiring about a conversation he had had with their mutual friend Roger Fry, whose biography Woolf was writing.¹⁶ Shaw answered her questions and expanded the conversation by offering to give her “a picture by Roger,” and then closed with the following: “There is a play of mine called Heartbreak House which I always connect with you because I conceived it in that house somewhere in Sussex where I first met you and, of course, fell in love with you. I suppose every man did.”¹⁷

Woolf replied,

Your letter reduced me to two days silence from pure pleasure…. As for falling in love, it was not let me confess one-sided. When I first met you at the Webbs I was set against all great men having been liberally fed on them in my father’s house…. But in a jiffy you made me reconsider all that and had me at your feet. Indeed, you have acted a lover’s part in my life for the past thirty years and though I daresay it’s not much to boast of, I should have been a worser woman without Bernard Shaw. Heartbreak House, by the way, is my favourite of all your works.¹⁸

Fig. 1.2

Typed letter from Virginia Woolf to Bernard Shaw, 1940. Courtesy of The British Library for the Society of Authors, Literary Representatives of the Estate of Virginia Woolf

Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf shared so much more than social events and “puppy love” as they moved through the literary and socialist worlds in London in the early-to-mid twentieth century. In spite of their age difference and Woolf’s early disdain for Shaw and his works, they actually held similar convictions on most of the pressing issues of the day. For instance, they both embraced Fabian Socialism, Shaw as a founder of the movement and Woolf as a convert. Woolf’s diary records that she became a Fabian after attending a meeting on “The Condition of Peace” in January 1915 (WD I, 26). In particular, Woolf supported the Fabian anti-war platform, as did Shaw of course.¹⁹ Another abiding public crusade both writers shared was the abolition of censorship, which both considered a plague upon English society and on their respective works, an issue discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. Most prominently, in 1928 Shaw and Woolf publicly joined with other writers and luminaries to support Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a thinly veiled work about lesbian love that ran afoul of the British obscenity law, the infamous Hicklin rule (1868).²⁰ This aspect of their relationship will be considered more fully below (Figs. 1.3 and 1.4).

Fig. 1.3

Portrait of Virginia Woolf, 1927 (Alamy Photos)

Fig. 1.4

Shaw at his writing hut in the garden of his residence at Ayot St. Lawrence, 1945 (Alamy Photos)

On a more personal level, these two singular individuals from markedly disparate backgrounds—she from privilege, he from genteel poverty—shared traits, beliefs, and experiences that shaped their lives and work:

• Both were autodidacts with one prominent parent who helped to shape their education. Shaw flouted his lack of formal schooling as enhancing his innovative writing, although his mother Bessie Shaw, a classically trained would-be diva, advanced his extensive musical education. Woolf decried the society that denied her a formal education but received rigorous tutoring from her brilliant and learned father, Sir Leslie Stephen.

• Both were inveterate writers who wrote daily diary entries, countless letters, numerous essays and reviews, and of course novels and plays.

• Both were strongly anti-Victorian and anti-sentimentalist, traits reflected in their works.

• Both were ardent feminists, albeit reluctant to claim that label. Both wrote continually about women’s issues, which often resulted in conflicts with the authorities and the social purity movement.

• Both sought to revolutionize their predominant respective genres: the drama and the novel. Shaw boldly used his art to demand reforms at almost all levels of society, while Woolf’s social message was more nuanced, especially in her early novels. However, as her fame increased, she gradually became a bold voice seeking improvement for the lives of women, as well as freedom for her generation from a stifling patriarchy.

The Period

Toward the end of the Victorian era, the British populace still clung to Victorian mores (however hypocritical) through agents of supposed public morality such as the social purity movements. Josephine Butler founded the Social Purity Alliance in 1873 to promote chastity, especially in young men, and by 1886 branches of this alliance were popular throughout England.²¹ The social purity movement also campaigned against incest, and “mothers’ unions” grew in influence. In the 1890s “Snowdrop Bands” urged girls to attend purity lectures and “pledge themselves to discourage all wrong conversation, light and immodest conduct and the reading of foolish and bad books.”²² Between 1888 and the late 1930s, often in league with government censors, organizations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice and W.T. Stead’s National Vigilance Association threatened writers suspected of “deviant art” through “visits and surveillance, public proclamations and warnings, and threatening letters as well as trials for obscene libel.” Stead, claiming only a desire to improve society, promoted a form of sensational journalism that became a prototype of today’s exposé journalism.²³ A crusading journalist and one-time publisher of Shaw’s book reviews, Stead investigated so-called white slave traffic and produced sensational articles such as “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885), which gave, among other sordid examples, detailed accounts of young girls sold into prostitution by their parents, and “The Violation of Virgins” (1885), which inflamed public sentiment and helped make “recalling the nation’s ‘fallen women’ a new form of social activism.”²⁴ The ramifications of his and other crusading journalists’ work ultimately changed British legislation relating to age-of-consent for marriage and state-regulated prostitution.²⁵ Stead also campaigned against the double standard for men and women, although in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw castigates Stead’s view that women should be subservient to men.²⁶

But women, especially prostitutes, got the worst of it. The movement closed brothels and prostitutes lost their livelihood.²⁷ Stead was now a tireless self-promoter who capitalized on the “new vogue of morality” and who also emphasized the immorality of victims such as those prostitutes who were violently killed during the Whitechapel murders. Stead’s brand of coverage soon influenced mainstream newspapers such as The Times, which published letters implying that the more privileged classes did not want the violent and unsavory atmosphere that produced the Whitechapel killer to infect their neighborhoods, thus by implication placing the blame on the female victims themselves.²⁸

Nevertheless, women joined the social purity movement in significant numbers, adding a somewhat deceptive “feminist” element to purity speakers and chastity leagues. Social purity campaigns produced social frameworks that both empowered and disabled women of different classes in complex ways. The changes brought about by the movement restricted working-class women while giving “new possibilities of thought” to middle-class women, enabling them to consider their “sexual subjectivity”²⁹ and envision new avenues of expression in the restrictive Victorian society. These movements also enlisted the aid of the government and circulating libraries to scrutinize literary works for possible obscenity and “demanded that the arts be as pure as possible.”³⁰ For example, Stead’s National Vigilance Association also played a major role in the condemnation of Henry Vizetelly, translator of Emile Zola’s La Terre, for his work in perpetuating “obscene literature” such as Zola’s 1887 novel. Public morality groups deemed La Terre not only sexually corrupting, but also argued that the novel contributed to immorality in poor neighborhoods, possibly leading to the Whitechapel murders themselves.³¹

Significantly, as early as 1888, Shaw the journalist presented clear-sighted information about the appalling living conditions in areas such as the East End that countered sensational press accounts of poverty and squalor there. This rational, realistic press coverage led to modernizing the treatment of social issues such as poverty and violence against women and also contributed to modernizing journalism more generally. Shaw’s factual and reasoned comments on the sensationalizing of the Whitechapel murders and his defense of the Irish leader Charles Parnell during the scandal stemming from his relationship with the married Kitty O’Shea comprise his first public comments in the ongoing social morality debate. Shaw’s letters to The Star about the Whitechapel murders and the Parnell affair established him as a passionate advocate for reform of conditions contributing to poverty in England and also for rational change to England’s antiquated divorce laws. His journalistic battles against the public morality fervor also translated into his early social justice plays, Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and even Pygmalion.³²

However, the public morality campaigns persisted and expanded to include “acts of gross indecency,” a code name for “homosexuality” that soon included lesbianism as well. The most notorious example of the influence of the social purity movement came in 1928 when Sir Chartres Biron, presiding Magistrate, “ordered the destruction of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a polemical novel pleading for social tolerance for lesbianism,” which was initially banned by the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. Critics suggest that Hall could have escaped censorship had she treated what was considered “unacceptable sexual doctrine” with humor or satire or with moral censure. However, Hall’s novel clearly advocated tolerance for lesbianism in a serious manner. A public outcry ensued, led by editorials in the Sunday Express calling for official censorship, which eventually led to the withdrawal of the book by Hall’s publisher, Jonathan Cape.³³ Thus Hall’s book was in effect censored by the government, the press, and by her very own publisher. But “The Battle of a Book” soon became a rallying point for like-minded artists when the Herald interviewed H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw for an article praising Hall’s “high-minded sincerity.” Shaw seized this opportunity to continue his “infamous rant” against censorship: “If this sort of thing is going to happen, no books will be published in England…. I read it [The Well] and read it carefully, and I repeat that it should not have been withdrawn.”³⁴ Woolf stood ready to testify and defend the novel but was never called to the stand. Despite Woolf’s and Shaw’s support, the legal battle over The Well became a contest between Hall’s publisher and the British magistrates in an all-male critique of a work about lesbianism. Cape, prosecuted as the book’s publisher, subsequently lost the trial and the appeal, and The Well of Loneliness was suppressed in England.³⁵ Hall died in 1943 and did not live to see her work published in her home country in 1949.³⁶ Republished in Paris, the novel was eventually translated into eleven languages and reissued in the United States, where it sold 100,000 copies annually for many years.³⁷

In addition to The Well, the suppression of literary works in England included those by such luminaries as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Shaw himself, and produced a backlash of “creative violence,” a counterattack against censorship that consumed much of the artistic world in the first decades of the twentieth century. This recurring challenge, an attempt by the artistic community to confront “an unfreedom, the oppressions of journalists, of gentle audiences, of timid readers of political and religious orthodoxy,” has a name: modernism.³⁸ This term expands “high modernism” to include more writers, such as Shaw, who was never a member of the modernist elite, which included Pound and Joyce, who created a “higher” art form inaccessible to many. Shaw and other writers of the period shared the high modernists’ program of radical change for their society, not only for art. At the time, “modernism”—now a slippery, overused term—described the work of artists in many genes with common goals: resisting oppression, challenging cultural and social norms, and freeing artistic expression from the excessive emotion and sentimentality that had saddled their Victorians forebears.³⁹ Thus, censorship and modernism are inextricably linked, as the modernist program generally involves overturning conventional ideals and mores that censorship sought to protect. Although the stated rules for judging the appropriateness of plays—no profanity, no indecency, no representations of living persons—were fairly mundane, Shaw noted the governing but unwritten rule that never changed: “that a play must not be made the vehicle of new opinion on important subjects, because new opinions are always questionable opinions.”⁴⁰ These “new opinions” about art and societal norms, of course, form the bedrock of British modernism.

In his study of Shaw’s plays that do feature these new, sometimes daring opinions, John Bertolini considers dramas that depict Shavian authors, including Caesar, John Tanner, and Henry Higgins, as reflecting “Shaw’s dramatic craft and … self-consciousness about his craft, … and in [his] protagonists who are authors themselves, … or artist figures [including Saint Joan] and in representations of the act of writing or allusions to it.”⁴¹ I not only consider Shaw’s interior authors but also examine the nexus of modernism and censorship in one facet of the plays of the oft-censored Shaw: his creation of characters who either self-censor their own published or highly publicized work, or who are censored themselves by their fellow characters. I identify Shaw’s authors as Mrs. Clandon in You Never Can Tell, John Tanner in Man and Superman, Fanny O’Dowda in Fanny’s First Play, the Brothers Barnabas in Back to Methuselah, and the eponymous hero and Christ figure of Saint Joan. Similarly, Pamela Caughie identifies eight of Woolf’s novels and essays as featuring creative artists.⁴² These works present the artist or would-be artists as “original and autonomous” in various mediums (painting, storytelling, and poetry); however, my study focuses entirely on the singular, meta-reflexive characters who write. Similarly, I also identify Woolf’s authors as Jacob Flanders in Jacob’s Room, Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando in the eponymous novel, and Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts. Although each of these writers experiences censorship to varying degrees, suppression becomes a major factor in each work, forming an indelible connection to modernism.

Just as in the plays of Shaw, each of Woolf’s nine novels features conspicuous writing paraphernalia and the end products of writing—books, letters, essays—and especially incessant writing by her characters, both major and minor. For example, in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Terence Hewet often discusses plans for his novel about “silence … the things people don’t say”;⁴³ in Night and Day (1919), Katherine Hilbery and her mother organize and preserve the writing of Katherine’s grandfather, Richard Alardyce;⁴⁴ in To the Lighthouse (1927), Mr. Ramsay’s young son describes how his father wrote about “subject and object and the nature of reality.”⁴⁵ In Flush (1931), no less than Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning write and discuss their poetry;⁴⁶ in The Waves (1931), Bernard purports to write—“I am a natural coiner of words”—although no evidence of his writing is seen;⁴⁷ and in The Years, Edward Partiger, a Cambridge don, publishes a translation of “The Antigone of Sophocles done into English Verse.”⁴⁸ However, these characters, who mainly talk about writing, do not meet the criteria for being interior authors.

For the purposes of this study, censorship is defined as views, opinions, and especially creative works suppressed by government (often masked and satirized in Shaw’s plays and Woolf’s novels), critical, public and private entities, or by oneself.⁴⁹ Also, as we will see, Shaw, Woolf, and many other modernists knew that some works of their fellow progressive artists would never reach their intended audience because of their inferior literary quality, a form of market censorship that deemed the work itself unworthy of publication.⁵⁰

Both Shaw and Woolf as “revolutionary” authors fought censorship on multiple levels and, as a result, this common struggle became a major element in the fabric of their art and resulting fame. Both employed comedy, satire, and indirection to craft works laden with subversive social meaning, while producing some of the most famous, relevant, and enduring art of their era.⁵¹ This artistic strategy stemmed, in part, from the prevalence of the social purity movement. In England, social purity organizations survived until well into the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, organized morality movements, with varying degrees of influence, thrived during the entire writing lives of both Shaw and Woolf.⁵²

Shaw and Censorship

Shaw’s clash with the British censor actually began before his playwriting days. In the late 1880s, Shaw was promoting a revival of Shelley’s “closet drama” The Cenci and enthusiastically endorsing the plays of Henrik Ibsen when productions by both writers were banned. Shaw became incensed, blasting the censor in the Saturday Review as unfit to judge the plays of his literary heroes. Shaw soon experienced a more personal censorship, as all five of his early novels were effectively “censored” by publishers, some of them even refusing to read the unknown Shaw’s manuscripts. Later on, when Shaw became a fledgling dramatist and a more mature writer, three of his own plays were refused licenses: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, and Press Cuttings.⁵³ As a result, Shaw wrote over fifty articles and gave numerous speeches railing against censorship and exploiting its “absurdities.” Leonard Conolly explains Shaw’s reasoning: “The censorship … inevitably restricted the ability of plays to present ‘new opinions on important subjects,’ a restriction imposed only on playwrights—not, for example, on novelists or poets whose work was not subject to any kind of licensing system.”⁵⁴ Nevertheless, governmental censorship in Britain would continue for another fifty years, leaving Shaw “out of control” over the suppression of his ideas. Still, despite his continuing struggles with the official government censor, Shaw in his wisdom recognized the existence of other repressive forces. He enumerates these usual suspects: “Critics of all grades and ages, middle-aged fathers of families no less than ardent young enthusiasts, are equally indignant with me” (CPP 1: 248). Accordingly, Shaw often pluralized the noun: “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. There is the whole case in a nutshell” (CPP 1: 247).⁵⁵

Some critics, nevertheless, find that censorship of Shaw’s plays ultimately provided definite advantages for Shaw. R.F. Dietrich notes that the suppression of Shaw’s plays identified him as a martyr to the cause of artistic freedom and created a persona that appealed to the younger generation of English theatergoers, themselves rebelling against the vestiges of Victorian repression.⁵⁶ Similarly, Brad Kent contends that Shaw, having used his very public war on censorship to establish and over the years increase his own celebrity, eventually realized a greater freedom from censorship. Several Shaw plays in the 1920s were “given even more leeway because it was feared that Shaw … would turn the banning or recommended cuts into a media circus. The censors had finally realized that Shaw was in many ways seeking and generating free publicity in running afoul of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, and thus made a concerted decision to ignore him.”⁵⁷ So, whether blessing or curse, Shaw’s long playwriting career is inextricably linked with censorship, which also contributes significantly to his dialectic with British modernism.

Woolf and Censorship

Shaw’s “out of control” public battles with censorship brought him public humiliation and cost him precious time and money, as he fought against the suppression of his work, and eventually led to a triumph over the censors—who realized that public censorship only resulted in more fame for authors and their banned works. By contrast, Woolf’s skirmishes were milder and far less public. However, Woolf was surrounded by censorship practically her entire life. Her father Leslie Stephen, author and editor of many books, both “confronted censorship and acted as a censor. The Society for the Suppression of Blasphemous Literature … pushed for the suppression of Stephen’s work,” while he, as editor of Cornhill Magazine, supported Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd against readers’ protests but later rejected The Return of the Native, concluding that parts of the latter were “too dangerous for a family magazine.”⁵⁸ Thus, raised in a home where opinions mattered, even Woolf’s earliest writing efforts in the family’s internal newsletter, “Hyde Park Gate News,” caused angst as she waited for parental approval with “tense anticipation.” However, her mother’s assessment of her work as “rather clever” thrilled the budding writer.⁵⁹

Nonetheless, several of the young author’s early book reviews, which she submitted for publication, met a harsher fate. In April 1905, Bruce Richmond rejected her review of Edith Sichel’s Catherine de’ Medici and the French Revolution, stating that the review was “not written in the academic spirit.”⁶⁰ In 1909, Reginald Smith, editor of Cornhill Magazine, heavily edited several of her reviews, “add[ing] words to her sentences and cut[ting] out others” without her permission. Woolf threatened to resign as reviewer for the publication and did so later that year when Smith rejected her “Memoirs of a Novelist.” Each of these suppressions likely added to Woolf’s well-known anxiety about her work and personal wellbeing.⁶¹

In 1917, conceived partly as a hobby, partly as an unfettered outlet for their writing, Virginia and Leonard Woolf purchased a small hand press. Biographer Hermione Lee observes that soon both became “utterly absorbed; Virginia could hardly tear herself away; Leonard cursed the day they bought it, ‘because I shall never do anything else.’”⁶² Owning her own press with Leonard rewarded Woolf in many ways. She records in her diary: “I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like” (WD III, 43).

Still, not even owning one’s own press can completely insulate a writer from suppression. In 1920, A.B. Walkley, the Times drama critic and a friend of Shaw, attacked Woolf’s article on Henry James’s correspondence, and the following year her former editor Bruce Richmond asked her to remove the word “lewd” from her article on James’s ghost stories (WE iii, xix). Eventually even fame could not entirely protect Woolf from having her work suppressed. As late as 1939, her article on the royal family commissioned by Picture Post remained unpublished because of her “irreverent treatment” of the royals.⁶³ If the celebrated Virginia Woolf wanted complete freedom of speech, she had to print and publish her work herself!

Yet Woolf’s most fierce and continual battle over unfettered speech was with herself, and self-censorship would remain a significant factor in her writing career. Christine Froula explains: “Part of her mind has gone over to the other side and performs the work of censorship from within. This unwitting self-censorship illuminates the incredible difficulty and dangers she faces: not editors, publics and conventions ... not even an imaginary public of censorious men, but a quite unconscious wall of repression that obscures what she felt even from herself.”⁶⁴ Woolf discusses this process of involuntary self-censorship in her 1931 speech to the National Society for Women’s Service entitled “Professions for Women.” She cautions her audience about the problems of writing as a woman who must destroy the so-called Angel in the House, that Victorian paragon of womanhood and self-denial who continually whispers that women must be subservient to men, before she can find her own voice as a writer. Woolf’s diary entries reveal her continual concern about being beleaguered by censors, causing authors to feel self-conscious (WD v, 229). Woolf reasons that all writers are under this cloud of would-be suppressors, but that women are especially vulnerable to anxiety about censorship.⁶⁵ This negotiation of “internal and external censorship” produced a series of works that “battled taboos on speech—and thought about the sexual lives of women.”⁶⁶

Thus England’s preeminent novelist, Virginia Woolf, and its most famous playwright, Bernard Shaw, suffered, battled, internalized, and never totally freed themselves from the grip of their country’s censorship laws and their own personal censorship demons.

Shaw as Modern

Both Shaw and Woolf are considered groundbreaking modernists. Shaw was a proto-modernist in his early novels, then a theatrical modernist whose work revolutionized the British theater, while Woolf was a high modernist, whose brilliant narrative, representational, and structural style forever changed the English novel. The boundaries of the modernist period, whether programmatic or calendar-driven, are much debated, and consensus on which writers, artists, and thinkers should be included in the modernist camp has long been difficult to reach. Here is a useful definition: “a sense of unprecedented innovation in art, politics, and science beginning roughly in the 1860s required a designation—‘the modern’—that would recognize a specific period of rupture and crisis.”⁶⁷

Indeed, the mention of Shaw as a modernist often sparks debate. Is the long-lived Shaw a vestige of the Victorian era or a foundational figure in British modernism? Undeniably, Shaw lived and wrote during the heyday of modernism; however, does his often-bombastic style adhere to the modernist agenda of employing the precise, often sparse, language associated with modernist writers? And how does his mostly realistic staging relate to the stylistic revolution initiated by Woolf in the novel and T.S. Eliot in poetry? Articles in volume 35 of SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, dedicated to debating the pros and cons of Shaw’s modernist contradictions, conclude that the debate can be resolved only by acknowledging Shaw’s multifarious modernist legacy.⁶⁸

Two of the volume’s contributors make significant contributions to the discussion about Shaw as a modernist relevant to my study. Lawrence Switzky sees Shaw as “a figure both inside and outside the teleological narratives of modernism, both a Fabian bureaucrat and a militant counterinsurgent in the avant-garde.” Switzky avers that “Shaw’s sardonic, double-edged modernity embraces the modern as at once an absolutely distinct epoch and part of the historically continuous posture of thinking that the contemporary knows more and knows better than the past.” Matthew Yde is more specific, designating Shaw as both a utopian and programmatic modernist who contends that “utopia is a process and cannot properly begin until capitalism has ceased to exist, replaced by socialism.” Yde points to Shaw’s utopian fantasies, Back to Methuselah, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, and Farfetched Fables as examples of Shaw having realized that socialism is not enough, hence his turning to Creative Evolution to advance the race, thus blending the modernist utopian vision of hope with the more pragmatic tenets of modernism and socialism.⁶⁹ Christopher Innes not only firmly places Shaw’s dramatic art in the modernist camp (as an expansion of Elite Modernism) but also posits that “it is Shaw’s version of modernism that dominated British theatre for the entire modernist era.” Innes proposes that Shaw’s version of modernism applies best to theater than to other art forms:⁷⁰ “in drama the most influential practitioners of Modernism are defined by the infusion of a modernist spirit into standard theatrical forms. This had been begun by George Bernard Shaw, whose refurbishing of the traditional melodrama and romance offers a basic example.”⁷¹ Moreover, Innes suggests that Shaw demonstrates the modernist suppression of emotion by “distancing spectators through shock effects (as with the connection between capitalism and prostitution in Mrs. Warren’s Profession) or reversal of expectations (as with Eliza’s rejection of Higgins in Pygmalion).”⁷² Cecilia Marshik also identifies Shaw as a modernist by recognizing that in works such as his preface to Mrs. Warren, he “implied that the very fact that his plays had been censored prove their modernity and progressive character,” and that such censorship was “proof positive of his radical social programs … placing him on the side of ‘progress,’ of challenging [outdated] institutions and social values.”⁷³

Woolf as Modern

Although early twentieth-century modernism was primarily a male domain, dominated by Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, “modernism had mothers as well as fathers.”⁷⁴ The definition of modernism given by Lawrence Switzky applies to Woolf’s work as well as Shaw’s: “a sense of unprecedented innovation in art … recognized as [contributing to] a period of rupture and crisis.”⁷⁵ Michael Levenson calls the modernist art of Woolf and others as acts of “creative violence … a challenge [to] unfreedom, the oppressions of journalism, of genteel audiences, of timid readers, of political and religious orthodoxy…. The name of the tyrant had changed—the Editor, the Lady, the Public, the Banker, the Democrat—but whatever the scenario, the narrowness of the oppressor was seen amply to justify the violence of the art.”⁷⁶ Woolf’s trademark disruptors of conventional thought and art are well known: the broken sentence (Jacob’s Room and Orlando), “atoms of life” (Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway), shifting narrators (Jacob’s Room), taboo subjects (Jacob’s Room and Orlando), the split subject (Mrs. Dalloway), the anti-hero (Jacob’s Room), and the anti-Bildungsroman (Jacob’s Room). In addition, Woolf’s essays on “modern” and “modernisms” are considered foundational documents of the genre, as “An Unwritten Novel” positioned her as a high modernist whose work has been enduringly popular for generations,⁷⁷ leading some critics to opine that “at present, modernism needs Woolf more than Woolf needs modernism.”⁷⁸ Nevertheless, the abiding topic and resulting literary techniques of Virginia Woolf and Bernard Shaw in their respective genres remains their continual struggle in the censorship wars. Their recurrent engagements with censorship as a representative act and their multiple methods of combating that repression remain their strongest link to modernism and to each other.

The censorships of their day and their methods of avoiding them are especially relevant to this study. Both Shaw and Woolf create sometimes subtle, at other times bold, approach-avoidance mechanisms to combat the suppression of their work, often using censorship to their advantage to score subversive points in their writing. At other times, they felt its sting, as friends, critics, and publishers alike rejected their work. Shaw’s plays were publicly censored by various members of the censorship machine, while Woolf, after relatively minor but meaningful brushes with censorship, came closer to being censored by government officials than she may have realized.⁷⁹

Interestingly, both writers coalesced much of their representations of censorship around the figure of the prostitute, considered by both to be a symbol of exploitation and gender discrimination by their patriarchal society, which lacked acceptable economic opportunities for women. In their day, to mention or portray a prostitute in a work of fiction was not only illegal but also considered an affront to the social purity movement, which fought against prostitution, sometimes with vigilante enforcement, in the 1880s and beyond.⁸⁰ Marshik explains the complexity of representing this figure, which had become an “index” by which to measure the extent and limits of legal, social, and economic change during the period. By depicting prostitutes, male writers such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Shaw “were conflated with johns and pornographers because they rejected the moralizing, scientific distance demanded by reformers and government officials. Woolf ran a parallel risk; she could not be slotted into the role of the male john, but she could be conflated with her subject, the prostitute,”⁸¹ as a “public” woman, one who writes and publishes her work. Shaw flaunted the prostitute most infamously in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, while Woolf’s more discreet but definitely recognizable public women appear in her earliest novel The Voyage Out and later in Jacob’s Room and Orlando.

In related but no less inflammatory representations of the lives of women, both Shaw and Woolf consider the plight of women on the legitimate side of economic opportunities for women: marriage. Shaw’s ideas on conventional marriage are presented in The Quintessence of Ibsenism and his Preface to Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and are summarized by Mrs. Warren herself in Act II: “The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her” (CPP 1: 314). Written almost forty years after Shaw’s Quintessence and Mrs. Warren, “Professions for Women” and A Room of One’s Own illustrate Woolf’s views on the plight of respectable women.⁸² Both Shaw and Woolf agree that women must have legitimate professional and economic opportunities outside the home and that their society cannot advance until such avenues are open to all women. The rejection of the ideals represented by the Womanly Woman and the Angel in the House is a major theme in their oeuvre and a catalyst to the curse of censorship that both directly and indirectly affected it. Woolf asserts that it is the job of the writer to kill the Angel,⁸³ while Shaw continually attempts to expose if not eliminate the Womanly Woman.

To escape/avoid the multifarious censors of their day, both Shaw and Woolf relied on artistic techniques such as satire, irony, and indirection to deflect potential critiques. Both the struggle with and accommodation of censorship became a major facet in their modernity. Shaw was given to exaggeration and overstatement, while Woolf employed satire, irony, and even codes and whispers to protect or sometimes to call attention to her subversive message. In addition, both created interior authors who speak for them—and suffer the consequences. The heavy hand of the censors, both public and private, descended on the Edwardian Shaw and the Georgian Woolf and influenced their work, especially their creation of interior authors who are both censored and modern.

Additionally, wartime England generated increased levels of censorship, and the Defense of the Realm Act (1914) gave officials license to suppress works that strayed from official propaganda.⁸⁴ As a result, all writers faced increased pressure to modify or at least remain silent about their own views on the conflict. Nevertheless, both Shaw and Woolf wrote strongly worded polemics against war—and suffered the consequences. In 1914, Shaw appealed to the public for a rational approach to Britain’s entry into World War I in his pamphlet “Common Sense about the War.”⁸⁵ Because he presented the often-unfounded rationales of both parties involved in the conflict, Shaw’s essay was misinterpreted as a pro-German appeal. As a consequence, Shaw was unwelcome at several prestigious literary societies, and resigned from the Society of Authors. Nevertheless, during this brouhaha over his loyalties, Shaw unobtrusively contributed £20,000 to the war effort, reaffirming that although war is wrong, once a country engages in it, it must support its troops by every means possible. As the dead and wounded soldiers began returning home, the country’s attitude toward Shaw softened, and he eventually regained his prominent place in English literature and society. Thus, war serves as a major theme or subtext in one-third of Shaw’s dramas.⁸⁶

Some twenty-four years later, Virginia Woolf faced a similar problem after she expressed her opinions about war and the growing threat of fascism in her long essay Three Guineas, dubbed by one reviewer a “revolutionary bomb of a book.” Woolf’s goal in writing this treatise was to “turn anger into art,” and she accomplished this feat by incorporating into her work two of her other perennial arguments with English society: education and women’s rights.⁸⁷ The result was a scathing critique of an English educational system that excluded women, while forcing them to make sacrifices for their brothers’ educations so they could enter professions that either led to or supported war (TG, 70). In Woolf’s view, that privileged, male-oriented education valorized war by relying on a curriculum laden with the biographies and histories of great fighting men (TG, 39–42; 73–74), which excluded women from the country’s history. In Three Guineas, she proposes a different curriculum based on cooperation, drawn primarily from the arts and without the competitive nature resulting from the examinations, degrees, and “poisoned vanities and parades” of the current educational system (TG, 39–41). She closes Three Guineas by calling for new words and new methods that do not even unconsciously promote war, and for men and women to join together “to the respect in their persons of the greatest principles of Justice, and Equality and Liberty” (TG, 164).

Her contemporary critics—including some extended family members—reacted harshly, calling the work “muddled … neither sober nor rational,” “self-indulgent,” and “silly.” However, the most damning were those critics who questioned Woolf’s mental stability and labeled her work “shrill”—her most dreaded criticism. Unfortunately, Woolf did not live to see Three Guineas become a mainstay of the feminist/Marxist cannon, fully recognized as the “utopian meditation that it is.”⁸⁸ Notably, Woolf’s anti-war passion appears, to varying degrees, as a subtext in Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts.

Thus, both these revolutionary authors were harshly critiqued for their beliefs and how they expressed them. However, neither abandoned her/his convictions, but rather built a mighty arsenal of literary devices with which to express them. One of the most prominent of their weapons is their remarkable deployment of interior authors to convey their respective messages of peace, equality, and freedom of expression.

The Interior Author

This book considers the interior authors of Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf and examines the connection of modernism and censorship in one facet of their respective plays and novels: their creation of characters who either self-censor their own work or who are censored by their fellow characters. Against the dialectic of censorship and modernism that shaped the work of Shaw and Woolf, their fictional authors may be considered as reflections of their creators and their milieu. Additionally, in many instances, Shavian and Woolfian authors mirror a more personal note for their creators, manifesting their preoccupation with their authorial selves, especially in relation to other writers. Furthermore, each play or novel examines the artist’s responsibility as a creator, as an establisher of order, or as a reformer of morals.⁸⁹

Also, in this study, I employ the trope of the “interior author” as a lens through which to view the self-reflexive nature of Shaw’s and Woolf’s meta-texts, texts that tend to focus not only on the events and characters being narrated or dramatized but on the creation of the texts themselves. In these meta-texts, the “interior authors” often serve as reflections of their “exterior authors” as they confront the struggles faced by Shaw and Woolf in their creation of these texts and their affirmation of modernism. Artistic doubts and difficulties are not obstacles, but rather motivating factors as they create their art.⁹⁰

In many of Shaw’s novels and plays and all of Woolf’s novels considered in this study, the interior author, more than a stand-in or surrogate writer, experiences the full spectrum of authorial involvement from the conception to the final development of the artistic expression. The story of the interior author becomes not only an account of what is written but also a meta-narrative of the writing process itself. Additionally, not only does the interior author as a character within the play or novel foreshadow the creation of the text within the text, but she/he also comments on the actual creative process by the external authors, Woolf and Shaw. For example, when Miss La Trobe, the interior author of Woolf’s Between the Acts, sits in her cottage, struggling with the “skimble-scamble” that will become the script of her pageant, grudgingly mindful of the requirements of the pageant organizers, i.e., her audience (BA, 69), she portrays the act of writing her pageant. She also reflects on her artistic creation to call attention to Woolf’s process of creating the novel and Miss La Trobe herself, while Woolf remains mindful of her own audience and their possible reaction to her provocative character. Similarly, Shaw’s Barnabas brothers in Back to Methuselah anxiously create many drafts of their Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, which detail the theory of humanity’s ability to live at least three-hundred years, all the while attempting to hide the text from family, friends, and especially politicians who would exploit their work for political gain (CPP 5: 379–438). This self-reflexive double vision of the interior author renders her/him more than a stand-in for the author and adds the dimension of commentator on the writing process itself, especially as it concerns censorship, often self-censorship, and modernism.

The interior author, always a generator of ideas, thus creates as a meta-text, a trope that focalizes and structures the fears, misgivings, and resistance of a writer about his/her society that often rejects the author’s revolutionary writing. The internal writer’s intention is modernist in the sense that it defies older (Victorian) norms, while also attempting to change the audience’s reading and reception of literary texts, and ultimately to transform society itself.

The interior author could be constructed for any number of purposes that convey the author’s central concerns. For my study, the primary objective of the interior author is that of a reformer, one who conveys the author’s preoccupation with censorship and social change. The interior author thus functions as a meta-author, demonstrating the joys, anxieties, and rewards of the writing process. As with the theory of the implied author, the interior author becomes the focus behind the work, conveying the author’s message about censorship and reform and revealing “the normative moral order” underlying the strategy and arrangement of the work.⁹¹ Although interior authors are never confined to a single function, their primary association with an author’s central message identifies them with that focus, and thus with the author him/herself.

Woolf’s and Shaw’s desires to revolutionize their respective art forms reveal a deep-seated dissatisfaction with their own genres in their current forms and also with modernism, with its make-it-new philosophy. Yet one of high modernism’s central tenets had been to establish a degree of difference that placed barriers between the reading/viewing audience and the text.⁹² Thus, high modernism was anathema to the reformer Shaw and was ultimately rejected by Woolf as she developed a need to connect with her audience, especially in her later works. The trope of the interior author thus serves as a device to comment on respective forms of modernism (Shaw in the theater, Woolf in the novel). With their interior authors representing their own experience with suppression and social reform, both Shaw and Woolf solidly project the issues of censorship and modernism onto the works for which they have become famous.

Both Shaw and Woolf wrote in many genres and forms. Their opinions and thoughts are revealed in personal letters, diaries, essays, reviews, novels, and plays. Their work is frequently concerned with the act and art of writing. This book examines their fascination with writing, which manifests itself in several different ways, in particular in their interior authors. These authorial characters most often reflect their author in some way: from autobiography to characters who present a message that mirrors the many social and artistic causes that consumed both writers. After this introductory chapter, Chap. 2 explores the genesis of Shaw’s passion for writers and introduces the early novels in which he virtually taught himself to write; Chap. 3 continues this study in Shaw’s last two novels. Shaw’s plays form the basis for Chap. 4 and feature interior authors in his early dramas; Chap. 5 examines the interior author in two of his mature plays. In an interlude (Chap. 6) that divides my treatment of Shaw and Woolf, I present a brief discussion of the differences between plays and novels. Interestingly, although both wrote in both genres, many of their works contain strong elements of both forms. Chapter 7 begins by examining Woolf’s highly experimental novel Jacob’s Room and the more famous Mrs. Dalloway. Both of these works contribute to Woolf’s standing as a modernist writer and reveal her views on the causes and consequences of war. Chapter 8 treats Woolf’s bon vivant time-traveling author Orlando, a character based in part on Vita Sackville-West, and analyzes Woolf’s highly dramatic Between the Acts and its interior playwright, Miss La Trobe. I examine each of Shaw’s and Woolf’s works vis-à-vis the plague of censorship and the zeitgeist of modernism, two elements that shape their interior authors and their messages of artistic and social reform and, indeed, their entire oeuvre. I conclude (Chap. 9) by examining the social activism of both Shaw and Woolf and how this involvement in social issues influenced their work.