The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

by Eleanor Fitzsimons

  His friendships with women, although often platonic, were more intimate than was generally the case at that time. In 1886 he withdrew from a burgeoning relationship with fellow Fabian Annie Besant because he was fearful that it “threatened to become a vulgar intrigue.”40 Yet it was he who had suggested they cohabit, since she was not free to marry. She responded by presenting him with a list of terms that he deemed “worse than all the vows of all the churches on earth.”41 She had been helpful to him professionally, serializing his novels and employing him as art critic for Our Corner. She was impressed by his commitment to Socialism: “I found that he was very poor,” she wrote, “because he was a writer with principles and preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism.” Besant inspired the heroic Raina Petkoff in his play Arms and the Man (1894).

  In a similar fashion, Shaw withdrew from a potential relationship with William Morris’s daughter May, who was an exceptionally accomplished artist in her own right. They had become staunch friends after they met at a lecture he delivered. Although she sent him a beautiful Valentine card in February 1886, nothing developed between them. In 1890 she married Henry Halliday Sparling, secretary of the Socialist League. Shaw stayed with the couple in 1892 when the drains needed mending at 29 Fitzroy Square. He described his time there as “probably the happiest passage in our three lives.” For some reason he became convinced that he had experienced a “mystic betrothal” with May.42 Yet he stopped short of a full-blown love affair and told Hesketh Pearson:

  To be welcomed in his [Sparling’s] house and then steal his wife was revolting to my sense of honour and socially inexcusable; for though I was as extreme a freethinker on sexual and religious questions as any sane human being could be . . . I knew that a scandal would damage both of us and damage The Cause as well.43

  The marriage did not survive, and Sparling, who had little interest in the nuances of a “mystic betrothal,” left for Paris. He confided in journalist Holbrook Jackson, who explained:

  After completely captivating his wife Shaw suddenly disappeared, leaving behind him a desolate female who might have been an iceberg so far as her future relations with her husband went.44

  Shaw’s relationships were not always so fraught or damaging. He became what he described as a “Sunday husband” to Eleanor Marx while she was ensnared in a desperately one-sided free union—a romantic partnership without legal or religious recognition—with Edward Aveling, an untrustworthy philanderer. Edith too befriended Marx and invited this troubled young woman to her home. Ashamed that she was not free to marry Aveling, who had not divorced his first wife, she explained: “I could not bear that one I feel such deep sympathy for as yourself should think ill of, or misunderstand us.”45 She clearly had no idea how unconventional Edith’s marriage was. As Shaw noted, Hubert, in direct contradiction to his own philandering, “held the most severe and rigid sentiments in all sex questions,” and took “a violently condemnatory tone in denouncing everybody who made any attempt at sexual freedom.” Shaw did point out that his position was “fundamentally a little weak.”46

  Although he regarded Hubert as “an affectionate, imaginative sort of person,” Shaw acknowledged that he was “not a restful husband.”47 Little wonder Hubert informed Hector Hushabye, the roguish womanizer from Heartbreak House (1919). Hushabye is a “very handsome man of fifty, with mousquetaire moustaches, wearing a rather dandified curly brimmed hat, and carrying an elaborate walking-stick.” This passage of dialogue could have been lifted from one of Hubert’s essays, although there are elements of Shaw here too:

  She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love to her automatically. What am I to do? I can’t fall in love; and I can’t hurt a woman’s feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I’m not a bit in earnest.48

  On March 6, 1885, Shaw called on Eleanor Marx and found Edith there with Philip Bourke Marston, her sister Mary’s former fiancé. Three days later Edith and Shaw met once again at Marx’s house. Afterward they walked together to Charing Cross station, where he waited with her until she boarded her train.49 Soon Shaw was a regular visitor to the Bland home. On occasion, Hubert and he would don boxing gloves to engage in a bout of sparring; Shaw noted one such occasion in his diary on May 18, 1885. According to Frank Harris:

  Edith Nesbitt [sic], poetess and fairy-tale writer, rather mischievously set him sparring once or twice with her husband, Hubert Bland, a really formidable heavy-weight, who was fortunately merciful.50

  Hubert was a skilled boxer, but Shaw was the taller of the two and had a longer reach. He had also competed in the Queensberry Amateur Boxing Championships of 1883.

  When Shaw paid a visit to the Bland home in August 1885, Edith, Hubert, and he got caught up in “an energetic discussion on the subject of whipping children.”51 He bumped into Edith at the British Museum a few days later, and they continued this discussion. From March 1886 onward, Edith’s name begins to appear with greater frequency in Shaw’s diary. They would bump into each other in the reading room of the British Museum and head for lunch or hot chocolate. On Saturday June 26, Shaw noted:

  Mrs Bland at museum. I did some German and read a little P E [Political Economy] for my lecture; but on the whole the day was devoted to Mrs Bland. We dined together, had tea together and I went out to Lee with her, and played and sang there until Bland came in from his volunteer work. A memorable evening!52

  Underneath he totted up the expenses he had incurred. He had been obliged to borrow money from Edith to pay for first-class train tickets, an extravagance that was almost certainly motivated by their desire for privacy. When he repaid her loan by postal order the following Monday, she sent a playful letter of thanks and told him she was looking forward to meeting him at Annie Besant’s house the following day, since she wanted his opinion on something she had written; “make fun of it as much as you like, to me,” she teased.53 In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Mr. Henry dismisses Daphne’s drawings as “rubbish” and advises her to burn them. “What’s the good of getting a little money if you can’t look yourself in the face afterward?” he chastises.54 They left Annie Besant’s house together and had supper at the Wheatsheaf, one of Shaw’s favorite vegetarian restaurants.

  On July 8, Edith and Shaw attended a meeting of the Vigilance Committee of the Tower Hamlets Radical Club. Afterward they took a cab to Ludgate Hill and a train to Blackheath, then walked almost as far as Edith’s home in Lee. It took Shaw more than two hours to trudge back to his lodgings on Osnaburgh Street, which he reached sometime after half past three in the morning. He took Edith back there two weeks later. However, he was taken aback when she turned up early the following morning while he was having breakfast with his mother. They arranged to meet in Regent’s Park at ten o’clock and walked for an hour. At least one account has it that Edith was walking arm in arm with Shaw in Regent’s Park, chatting in a ladylike fashion, when she suddenly exclaimed, “Shaw, I do believe it’s going to rain like Hell.” This outburst was thought to have influenced a scene in Pygmalion. When Freddy asks Eliza if she is going to walk across the park, she replies, “Walk? Not bloody likely!”55

  Decades later, when he recalled this period of his life, Shaw described Edith as “very attractive” and insisted he had been “very fond of her and paid her all the attention I could.”56 Yet by September 1886 he was reverting to his evasive habits. A peevish diary entry for September 15 records that Edith “would not be denied coming back here to tea.” Three days later he “began composing a song to Mrs Bland’s words.”57 His desire to bring matters to a close may be evident in his refusal to continue paying for first-class rail travel. They traveled second-class to Finsbury on the evening of October 25 before switching to third-class, “for the sake of company” he noted in his diary, and disembarking at Enfield, where they e
ndured a miserable walk in the rain. At least Shaw relented and bought Edith a hot whisky before accompanying her first-class to Pentonville, where she was staying at the time. On Halloween night they met at Portland Road Station at ten o’clock, in the rain, in order to walk “along Camden Road, Caledonian Road and Barnsbury Square,” where they planned to “look at the house she lived in as a girl.” He left her in Claremont Square and walked home alone.58

  As 1886 came to a close, Shaw, who liked to sum up each year at the back of his diary, noted:

  E.B. (Mrs Bland known as Edith Nesbit by her poetry.) One of the women with whom the Fabian Society brought me into contact. On the 26th June 1886 I discovered that she had become passionately attached to me. As she was a married woman with children and her husband my friend and colleague, she had to live down her fancy. We remained very good friends.59

  He was fully aware of the dangers involved. “It is only natural that a man should establish friendly relationships with the wives of his friends,” he told Hesketh Pearson, “but if he is wise he puts all idea of sex out of the question.”60 Pearson believed that Shaw “steered” Edith “through her infatuation as best he could, finally keeping her just off the rocks.” In Don Giovanni Explains, an autobiographical short story Shaw wrote in the summer of 1887, he declared:

  People who are much admired often get wheedled or persecuted into love affairs with persons whom they would have let alone if they themselves had been let alone.61

  Little wonder fellow Fabian Grace Black, sister of trade unionist Clementina Black and another would-be lover, begged him to “care more for people for that is where you seem to fail.”62 He remained resolute. “Women are nothing to me,” he told actress Janet Achurch. “This heart is a rock: they will make grindstones for diamonds out of it after I am dead.”63 In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Daphne criticizes Shaw’s Man and Superman, prompting Mr. Henry to ask: “You think it’s always the men who do the running.” “Isn’t it?” she replies. “Yes,” he agrees. “In books.”64

  It seems their relationship remained unconsummated. Shaw confirmed as much in a letter to American actress Molly Tompkins, dated February 22, 1925:

  I remember a well known poetess (now no more) saying to me when I refused to let her commit adultery with me, “You had no right to write the preface if you were not going to write the book.”65

  Edith channeled her disappointment into her poetry. In “The Depths of the Sea,” a poem inspired by the Edward Burne-Jones painting of the same name, she likened herself to a mermaid who yearns for a mortal man before dragging him to his death.

  So I—seeing you above me—turn and tire,

  Sick with an empty ache of long desire

  To drag you down, to hold you, make you mine!

  Denied her prize, she laments:

  So I—I long for what, far off, you shine,

  Not what you must be ere you could be mine,

  That which would crown despair if it were won.

  Shaw set this poem to music, and it was published in To-day in September 1886.

  In a second poem titled “Bewitched,” Edith referred to Shaw’s “white malign face” but she changed this to “dark malign face” in order to conceal his identity. This poem includes the lines:

  I hate you until we are parted,

  And ache till I meet you again!

  Edith appeared to long for revenge:

  Could I know that your world was just I—

  And could laugh in your eyes and refuse you,

  And love you and hate you and die!

  Yet she denied that her poetry drew on her own experiences and insisted: “Right or wrong I could never bring myself to lay my soul naked before the public. My published poems are nearly all dramatic lyrics.”66

  Edith realized Shaw was withdrawing, but she still valued his opinion as a critic and asked him to review Lays and Legends, her first collection of poems. He explained that, as he was finishing An Unsocial Socialist, he could do nothing before December and only then if she were “hard pressed for it.” He asked if he might “read the book for pure pleasure.” Before he received it, he sent her a playful yet insightful mock review:

  The author has a fair ear, writes with remarkable facility and with some grace, and occasionally betrays an incisive but shrewish insight. On the other hand, she is excessively conventional; and her ideas are not a woman’s ideas, but the ideas which men have foisted, in their own interest, on women. It is needless to add that she is never original; and it is probable that if she ever writes a sincere poem, she will suppress it.67

  In an unsolicited and, ultimately, unpublished review he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, Shaw declared “the book is eloquent and talks to you, sometimes like an angry and unreasonable wife, sometimes like a restless and too sensitive girl, often like a noblehearted and intelligent woman.”68

  It is unclear if Hubert knew of the relationship between Edith and Shaw. Given his persistent infidelity, he had little justification for feeling aggrieved. Yet when he happened upon them in the British Museum one day, Shaw described him as looking “rather sulky.” Certainly he maintained a friendship with Shaw, with whom he had much in common. In one fascinating letter, Shaw congratulated Hubert and himself on a shared determination to write rather than follow the “sacred second-hand principles” that obliged men to pursue lucrative careers. He did acknowledge that this obliged his mother and Hubert’s “clever and interesting wife” to earn a living.69

  Although Edith continued to meet Shaw at the British Museum, he grew distinctly cooler. In May 1887 he reacted angrily when she insisted on accompanying him home. “My mother was out, and she went away after an unpleasant scene caused by my telling her that I wished her to go, as I was afraid that a visit to me alone would compromise her,” he wrote in his diary on May 11, 1887.70 They did meet occasionally that summer, but generally in the company of others. By September Shaw had stopped writing at the British Museum, since he found it “impossible to work amid acquaintances who kept constantly coming to chat with me.” He did return on September 30 “to hunt up some information for Mrs Bland.”71

  In Daphne in Fitzroy Street, Daphne declares of her relationship with Mr. Henry:

  “It is all over. Thank God, I do not love him any more!” “But, oh,” she told herself, “if only he would love me again, and try once again to make me love him! That is what I really want. That’s what would make the world really good again. If only I could hurt him as he hurt me. What’s the use of my not loving him when I can’t tell him so?”72

  Shaw always played down the significance of their relationship, but he conceded that Edith had talked of leaving Hubert for him. “No two people were ever married who were better calculated to make the worst of each other,” he told Doris Langley Moore.73 Edith was not the only one who put her life into her fiction. “If a man is a deep writer,” Shaw proclaimed, “all his works are confessions.”74 Nowhere is this more evident than in An Unfinished Novel, written during the summer of 1887. Although Shaw insisted he had abandoned it “from want of time,” it seems more likely that his thinly disguised critique of the Bland marriage was dangerously revelatory.75

  In the preface he wrote six decades later, he declared “the lover is the hero and the husband only the wife’s mistake.”76 The Maddicks are a discontented husband and wife, parents to three young children, who endure a fraught relationship exacerbated by genteel poverty. Dr. Maddick, who is a surrogate for Hubert, is vain and conceited, a flashy dresser and a flirt. His enigmatic, athletic wife, who is young, freckled, and more beautiful on examination than on first sight, wears an expression of “suppressed resentment and quick intelligence.”77 Although she is “imperfectly educated,” she makes up for this by being a voracious reader. Kincaid, the young doctor who enters their lives, is, like Shaw, rigorous in keeping “a record of his movements.” He is attracted by the intensity and variety of Mrs. Maddick’s emotions—“her restless suspicion, her shyness, her audacity, her impulsive
frankness, her insatiable curiosity, base jealousy and vulgar envy.”78

  When Mrs. Maddick asks Kincaid if he believes in love at first sight, he demurs. “I am not in love,” he insists, “and so . . . the subject bores me.” “I wish you would discuss it with me,” she persists.79 In a telling exchange, she explains:

  “Mr Maddick and I open one another’s letters because we have perfect confidence in one another.” He started at her voice: rage, tears, and defiance were struggling in it. He looked up, and saw that her large eyes were wet, and her cheeks red.80

  When Kincaid wonders why they don’t use alternative addresses, she responds: “He does; but I do not,” and explains:

  “There are reasons why a man should open his wife’s letters—at least he would if he were half a man. Some men are not. I should despise my husband if he cared so little for himself and for me as to let me get what letters I pleased.”81

  It would seem that Edith hoped for more commitment from Shaw, but he hid behind his “scruples” and insisted that he was reluctant to cuckold his friends or lead women “into trouble.”82 Yet his entanglements were generally with married women. “I was not attracted by virgins as such,” he explained in Sixteen Self Sketches:

  I preferred fully matured women who knew what they were doing. All my pursuers did not want sexual intercourse. Some were happily married, and appreciated our understanding that sex was barred. They wanted Sunday husbands, and plenty of them. Some were prepared to buy friendship with pleasure, having learnt from a varied experience that men are made that way. Some were enchantresses, quite unbearable as housemates. No two cases were alike.83

  George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irishwoman, fellow Fabian and champion of women’s rights, on June 1, 1898.* Naturally, he considered himself captured prey that had been pounced on when at his most vulnerable: “I should never have married at all,” he told Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, “if I had not been dead at the time.”84 He had fallen off his bicycle and agreed to recuperate in her home. In truth, they got on terribly well. According to Beatrice Webb, they were “constant companions, pedalling round the country all day, sitting up late at night talking.”85