As a spry octogenarian Bernard Shaw once responded curtly to an anonymous questionnaire asking about his life and work. Calling “rubbish” the suggestions that he collected cigar bands or wore undershorts to swim, Shaw warned: “Be careful about these silly lies which circulate—or used to circulate—in the American press. People want serious stuff about me now when they want anything about me at all” (1; Bernard Shaw, “His Life and Career,” ms. 2.11, G. B. Shaw Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin). In his recent biography of Shaw, A. M. Gibbs certainly meets this demand with a pointed and demystifying narrative replete with newly uncovered archival material. His Life is a welcome addition to the long line of Shaw biographies by, among others, Hesketh Pearson, St. John Ervine, and Michael Holroyd, with whose psychoanalytical approach Gibbs takes issue. Gibbs is a well-established Shavian scholar with the previous biographical forays Shaw: Interviews and Recollections (1990) and A Bernard Shaw Chronology (2001). The experience shows in his skillful synthesis of published and archival sources and in the authority with which he wields his consistent revisionism.

Myths about Shaw's childhood fall by the wayside. The poverty of the family was not as abysmal as Shaw depicts in his hyperbolic presentation of himself as a self-made man. His father was not an insufferable drunkard, but in fact a teetotaler when GBS was a teenager. The marriage of his parents was more amicable than previous accounts of its estrangement would have it be. Certainly he was not the product of adultery or a descendant of Cromwell. Many of the new documents on which Gibbs bases his case come from Tasmania, where several of Shaw's relatives emigrated. Gibbs's home in Australia made him a natural vehicle for this research. The new illustrations alone make the book worth its price. Shaw's juvenile sketches of Calypso and Prophet are particularly evocative, and Gibbs effectively develops a motif around the myths of the Greek nymph in Shaw's affairs with women. The bulk of the new material concerns his early years in Ireland, and Gibbs takes this lead to trace the familiar thread of Shaw as an “eternal Irishman” (245). In this aspect, Gibbs's book is a nice complement to B. C. Rosset's Shaw of Dublin: The Formative Years.

Along with the use of new archival material, what marks Gibbs's biography is the desire to find the figure of Shaw in his texts. The epigraphs to Life forecast this approach with quotations from Barthes and Shaw's own acknowledgment in Sixteen Self-Sketches that his works may all be confessions. Tracing the direct relation between Shaw's life and art by and large governs the choice of issues and texts into which Gibbs delves. For instance, in his discussion of John Bull's Other Island (1904), Gibbs notes the well-known biographical influences in the characterization of Larry Doyle and Father Keegan, but adds Broadbent's wooing of Nora Reilly as an analog to Shaw's courtship of Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Through this trinity of characters, Shaw recasts aspects of his life and creates the dialectical movement of one of his most witty and successful plays. Amid such biographical interpretations, Gibbs weaves together pointed textual illustration, deft contextualization, and insights into the philosophical underpinnings of Shaw's literature. The structure of John Bull, Gibbs notes, works to dissolve socially constructed discourses, and Shaw's critique of rabid nationalism as the result of a “suppressed natural function” is actually a resolute call for Irish independence (265). Only nationhood would end the curse of patriotic fervor.

There are clear limitations both to biographical criticism and to an emphasis on uncovered materials. Archives can cast a spell, and when attempting to cover Shaw's rich, lengthy life and voluminous body of work, the standard material may suffer. Texts such as Mrs. Warren's Profession and Saint Joan receive scant attention for the lack of biographical parallels or fresh sources. The famous debates between Shaw and Chesterton are mentioned in a sentence, and more could be said about the young Irish playwright's early years in London. His choice of vegetarianism and his critiques of rationalism appear as intellectual conclusions drawn from reading, and this process of forming values warrants more discussion. At times, the style of the biography reads akin to a list, as Gibbs outlines the family history in curt sentences peppering us with the known facts. The narrative drives toward the discussion of new sources and the vision of Shaw's life in his works. Sometimes the results fall flat, such as when Gibbs finds a portrayal of characters foreshadowing Shaw's career (102) or sees the romance in Cashel Byron's Profession as a “fictional forecast” of Shaw's own marriage (99). Biographical criticism runs the risk of being overly deterministic when its most secure and valuable place is to set initial parameters for interpretation. Shaw's literary works are of import to biography not because, as Gibbs implies, his life may appear in his art, but because readers are interested in how he thought generally.

In Shaw's extramarital affairs with women, Gibbs deploys just the right touch. The narrative does not shy away from scandal or dwell on prurient details. At the same time, knowing the love life of the “incorrigible philanderer” does indeed, as Gibbs illustrates, inform our interpretation of gender relations in such works as Pygmalion or The Apple Cart (104). Gibbs effectively corrects several aspects of the recollections and accounts concerning Shaw and his two significant mistresses, Stella Campbell and Molly Tompkins. The euphemism that Shaw and Tompkins shared in referring to their trysts, “the road to Baveno,” becomes in Gibbs's hand akin to Wilde's linguistic play with trips to Banbury (388). It is interesting that Gibbs does not comment on the claim that Shaw was the father of Tompkins's aborted fetus.

Shaw has received numerous critiques for the incommensurability of the style and substance within both his life and his art. For some, the form of his drama is not radical enough, and the fashion of his everyday life mere conventional unconventionality. Perhaps this reflects the gradualism of Fabianism, but it is also a product of the fact that his vitality will not be easily bound. Gibbs's biography reflects the charge of the life force that is Shaw, and it may not be in the nature of Shavian studies to have a definitive biography. Gibbs's offering nonetheless is certainly an authoritative one.