Shaw's main character certainly is unsocial. He says very pertinent things about the unfairness of the social order. He says reasonable things about the unimportance of romance. But he seems over all to say that emotions are unnecessary, art is a fraud, reason is the only thing that counts and humanity is hopeless. Read the first 2/3 of the book to get some great quotes about socialism, then feel free to go about your way elsewhere. ( )

Sometimes you see something you missed in your life of reading.
GBS was one of those. He was only an icon to me with a pointy beard, no longer popular, especially with the hip and then hippie set. I only knew of him thru references on Sesame Street –Miss Piggy-malion--and reading the credits to My Fair Lady.

So last week I ran into him lying on a shelf in the local library, an edition about 60 years old. Why not?
GBS was witty and could write dialogue for Bringing up Baby or any of the fast talking, screwball comedies. Oh, I forgot, they copied him, not the other way around.

How class-bound England was/is. Sometimes I forget about social class when I hang out in Silicon Valley (where they hide their fancy-pants au-pairs and yardmen). Those Victorians cemented class but left cracks for upward money. And you forget how eccentric and extreme-edge political those landed lords (and their lesser cousins) could be without disrupting upper class manners.

GBS writes polemics about mistreatment of the working class in the middle of snappy dialog. But readers skipped those pages to get to the characters spitting it out at each other as they danced around rituals of love and old fashioned hate, too.
You see how socialism was perceived b4 the communists took over Russia and hatched Stalin. GBS watched England losing its markets for manufactured goods because the rest of the world made things cheaper and predicted an England going broke. (sounds familiar?) , where they could only export workers. He didn’t forsee our overstuffed world and ad-driven continuous style-change buying that remade the world in its own image.

He sought a moral force that was rational. Religion was hocus-pocus; the church was just finishing up dealing with Galileo and the Pope declared himself infallible. GBS looked for non-revolutionary change to a more equitable world thru education. And he started the London School of Economics to explain it all.

In this book, GBS creates the rational man as hero, the anti-romantic, that would have been a detective if he were born in the 40’s, I bet. And the tough thinking woman could be played by Kate Hepburn or maybe Becky Sharpe if she gets incarnated in the computer game world. These two finally marry after his first wife sentimentally dies off and they accidentally get engaged in about a paragraph and realize love would only mess things up.

Hope I didn’t mess up the ending for you. ( )

Schoolgirl hijinks in late 19th century England, linked via some love interest, to a bit of activism for socialism. The politics of a bygone era are now not much of a distraction from a good story, in the way they may have been at the time of its first publication, when said politics were more current. ( )