Margaret Wheeler

Margaret wrote this letter to Shaw in 1946, when she was 38 and he was approaching his ninetieth birthday.

Letter to G.B.S.

August 3rd 1946

Dear Mr. Shaw,

I should like to have my own way about the way I address you, please. You can have yours about the way you don't address me.

In the absence of news to the contrary, I am assuming you have survived that famous birthday. I survived it myself, but only just. You have no idea of the demands it made upon my stamina and powers of endurance. My friends all know of my habit of not reading the newspapers and quite early on the morning of this stupendous birthday there was a knock on my door and there stood the first of them holding in her hand a newspaper with photographs of you emblazoned across it. "I know you're interested in Mr. Shaw" she said "and I thought you'd like to see this."

I peeped out of the doorway and was somewhat staggered to see a long procession stretching right up the road and winding three times round the park, and everyone in it was holding newspapers or magazines, or both. I stood all the morning receiving these offerings, with indomitable patience, until I was neck deep in a pyramid of articles, cuttings, interviews, photographs, and reminiscences about you. Just as I was almost submerged by the culminating two or three thousand, I stuck out my head and remarked with my last gasp, that it was a great mercy Mr. Shaw was so opposed to any celebration of his birthday; goodness only knows what would have happened if he'd thrown himself into it with any enthusiasm.

So now I have given up my intention of wearing your nicest photograph next to my heart; even I can't manage a pantechnicon full. But to be a little more serious, I really enjoyed it all and especially I enjoyed hearing your voice in the evening, over the radio. I laughed for joy, because you have exactly the sort of voice you ought to have, and I like it very much.

I liked the faint grumble of disgust in it as you referred to all those young women who want to play your St. Joan, (I'm not one of them, of course, I'm much too busy playing my Margaret Wheeler) - but if you are still looking for someone for the film version why not choose a boy? Your St. Joan is like no woman on earth, but you might find some of her qualities portrayable on the films by a beardless youth. Her voice, her youth, her immaturity, her headstrong enthusiasm, her camaraderie, her physical stamina, her authentic aura of military genius, and so on.

And I celebrated your birthday in my own way too; by buying the ten Penguins, the Back to Methuselah in the Oxford World Classics and the G.B.S. 90, and reading the lot - you will see from this that I am a person of the most delicate perception concerning the proper celebrating of any birthday of yours - and as this has been going on for days and days now, Charles is expecting my eyes to drop out at any moment.

One thing about your work has struck me that doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone else, even yourself. It is this: your preoccupation with Creative Evolution, with the Life Force and Woman, with creative genius in all its manifestations, combined with your incessant championing of women and womankind and your strange and restless searchings concerning them suggests irresistibly to me that you, a great man in your own right, may yet be a fore-runner, a torch-bearer, a precursor and an intensely hard-working clearer-of-the-way for another, a newcomer, a great creative genius, and that one a woman.

The idea fascinates me.

The world could certainly do with such a one; I myself should like to see her come: the high flowering of great creative genius in a woman should be something strange and rare and wonderful.

I believe you have been looking for this one all your life; in the highways and byways of the mind in the past, the present, and the future, in heaven and hell, in many other strange lands, and have gone ranging thro' the worlds of drama, literature and philosophy seeking her - that is why any woman who has shown even a spark of greatness or creative originality has been able to hold your interest and your questing hope: but even as you searched and failed to find her, you have been willing and striving towards her coming with all your might and main; with all the strength of your own genius. Attaboy!

I am aware that in saying this to you I am sticking out my neck a long way and that you may be exceedingly tempted to chop it; well, chop away! I don't mind. I can't descend from this envisaging of a Superwoman to write about Fred; lets leave him for another time. But even so, I have to come down to earth again - literally - and go and scrub some floors.

Yours as ever,
Margaret W.

copyright © Margaret Wheeler 1998
Not for re-publication, sale or distribution.

more about Madge:
[ Margaret Wheeler - short biography ] [ Dear Mr Shaw - text of Epilogue ]

selected texts by Madge:
[ Guardian reprint - Grandma (1964) ]
[ Reminiscences to Sheila (1981) ] [ Letter to G.B.S. (July 1946) ] [ Letter to G.B.S. (Aug. 1946) ]

Margaret's complete literary output throughout the whole of her life is currently being edited for publication, both digitally (in TEI-encoded format), and in conventional (i.e. printed book) form.
Serious enquiries from interested publishers should be sent via e-mail in the first instance.
Editors wishing to commission material on Margaret are welcomed, although journalists and free-lance media "researchers" after no more than free material for a story for their own financial gain will be politely turned away.

Information iniitially prepared and published by Sheila Bourner & Martin Wheeler
February 2000
to accompany the Channel4 TV social history documentary film series A Family Century