In the early, almost mythical, 1960s, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, the wife of George Bernard Shaw, was the subject of a thoroughly informative biography that managed to justify its existence while making only modest claims for Mrs. G.B. S.[1] Although some of the questions that it raised had their expected Freudian ring (What did she learn from her parents’ unhappy marriage? Was there sex between the Shaws?), they were handled with care and delicacy, out of deference—one presumes—to the famous man as well as to the limits of then current knowledge. Since Charlotte Payne-Townshend had not herself done anything much more noteworthy than marry the skittish Shaw, there were no real surprises in Mrs. G B. S., except perhaps that Shaw’s wife for nearly half a century seemed less recoverable than one would have thought. Janet Dunbar’s vivid portrait of the early years of a restless, intelligent young woman faded after the marriage, as if to illustrate how unlikely it was that anyone could stand out in relation to G. B. S. himself.

That Shaw’s wife did stand up to him is quite evident, nonetheless, and to some extent at least she followed her own non-Shavian interests. Like a number of others in the Twenties and Thirties with longings for the infinite, she came under the brief spell of the Russian philosopher Ouspensky, whose best-known work claimed to have found the key to the enigmas of the world, a claim that might have struck Mrs. Shaw as a