Description
Chatto & Windus, London, Published 1997. Hardcover with dust jacket, xiv, 834 pp. with 20 pages of black-and-white photographic plates; 25 cm; index by Vicki Robinson; printed and bound by Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent. First impression of the One-Volume Definitive Edition (number line 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2). This single-volume abridgement, with revisions by the author, of Holroyd's four-volume Bernard Shaw biography originally published by Chatto & Windus 1988 to 1992 (Volume 1: The Search for Love, 1856-1898; Volume 2: The Pursuit of Power, 1898-1918; Volume 3: The Lure of Fantasy, 1918-1950; Volume 4 Epilogue: The Last Laugh).
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Gray textured paper over boards with gilt lettering to spine; mild edge and shelf wear to covers. Binding tight. The unclipped dust jacket (UK price £25.00 net) features a painted portrait of Bernard Shaw on the front and a red-and-green repeating pattern on the spine and back panel surrounding a c. 1900 photograph of Charlotte and Bernard Shaw taken by G.B.S.; a few small nicks and light creasing to the jacket edges with mild shelf wear. Otherwise unmarked. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. The author's authorized abridgement and revision of his monumental life of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the Dublin-born playwright, critic, polemicist, vegetarian, Fabian socialist, and Nobel laureate. Holroyd's four-volume original was hailed as a masterpiece on first publication, with William Golding predicting that it would take its place "among the great biographies." This one-volume distillation tracks Shaw from his unsettled Dublin childhood (his father a drunk, his mother in thrall to the Svengali-like music teacher Vandeleur Lee), through his London reinvention as the legendary G.B.S. and his early career as novelist, music critic (Corno di Bassetto), Ibsenite drama critic, and Fabian polemicist; his marriage to Charlotte Payne-Townsend in 1898; the great campaigning plays (Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, John Bull's Other Island, Pygmalion); his loves for Ellen Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell, and others; and the late years through the 1925 Nobel Prize, Saint Joan, and his 1950 death. Illustrated with 20 pages of photographic plates including portraits of Jenny Patterson, Alice Lockett, Charlotte Payne-Townsend, Sir Henry Irving, Lillah McCarthy, Erica Cotterill, Molly Tompkins, and Harley Granville-Barker.
