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.

This book combines the insights of thirteen Shavian scholars as they examine the themes of marriage, relationships and partnerships throughout all of Bernard Shaw’s major works. It also connects Shaw’s own experiences of love and marriage to the themes that emerge in his works, showing how his personal relationships in and out of matrimonial bonds change the ways his characters enter and exit marriages and misalliances. While providing a wealth of new analysis, this collection of essays also leaves lingering questions for the reader to spark continuing dialogue in both individual and academic settings.

Matthew Arnold said it best: Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born. Late Victorian and early twentieth-century writers were caught on this dilemma of belief or rejection of God. Some took a leap of faith over those horns of doubt; others rebelled - but seldom completely. It was in their art that some of the issues were joined and others resolved. The essays in this collection examine six authors, from Thomas Hardy to D. H. Lawrence, tracing the arc of their spiritual quests from childhood to maturity, which resulted in the artist's religious and artistic achievement - that is, the Religion of Art. The priesthood of the poet, for example, was the Aesthete's belief that high art was beyond the bourgeois's understanding.

Designed to introduce the lives and works of those individuals who influenced the development of literary biography as a recognizable genre during the century.