Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim, Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?

Keywords:

• literary connections
• intertextuality
• politics
• gender
• Elizabeth von Arnim
• George Bernard Shaw
• Max Beerbohm

Notes

1 Leslie de Charms was Elizabeth von Arnim's daughter, Elizabeth (Liebet) Butterworth. Mark Rainley was the name used by Liebet for Alexander Frere-Reeves.

2 A book dealer took an unknown number of volumes to sell before the current collection was passed to the Huntington Library. An unknown number of popular novels was integrated into a Toulon municipal library, leaving only the more challenging books to the university library.

3 For a fuller gendered analysis of von Arnim's writing, see Römhild (2014).

4 See Pater (1900), especially his notion of ‘art for art's sake’.