Shaw's Sunday Wife

BOOK REVIEWS Faulk's aim is to examine "how the late-Victorian music hall received its own elaborate semantic coding through the efforts of intellectuals and culture workers." He couples music hall with modernity in his title, taking modernity in the narrow sense of professionalisation (a wellestablished line on the late-Victorian era). In fact, the diverse and often contradictory senses of the term modernity don't really feature in the book beyond the introduction, and in that sense it is perhaps mistitled, promising a wider analysis than it intends to deliver. Because of this detailed focus on the middle-class professional critical writing on the halls, the book can feel rather closed and metacritical at times, locked into secondary or tertiary discussions, the argument built around lengthy (if always subtle) readings of the rhetoric of a small number of essays. The book is also anxious to claim some elbow room by attacking received critical orthodoxies, not always convincingly. This is a standard demand of our contemporary professional marketplace, however , and barely detracts from the solid and detailed readings the book offers. Faulk's central contention is that the work of cultural studies to recover and examine popular culture has consistently underemphasized the role of mediation by a professional intelligentsia. He gathers together an impressive range of this kind of writing from the era, and the book therefore contributes another layer to the rich reclamation of primary materials and theorisations of the Victorian music hall in recent years. ROGER LUCKHURST Birkbeck College, University of London Shaw's Sunday Wife Bernard Shaw and Nancy Astor: Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw. J. P. Wearing, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xl + 235 pp. $60.00 WHAT a splendid sequence of letters, and what an odd fish of a genre selected correspondence is! Few writers have written so many letters that their publication is distributed in serial volumes, according to either the recipients or topics; fewer still have written letters so interesting as to warrant such publication. That Shaw runs with those few and fewer is quite proven by this volume of correspondence between two most unlikely friends: the eccentric socialist Irish playwright and the equally eccentric American Tory MP, Nancy Astor, the first woman to take a seat in the British House of Commons. The splendor of their letters, covering the years 1927-1950, has everything to do with the oddness of the genre to which they belong. For, despite its appearance as a documentary record, Bernard Shaw and Nancy 197 ELT 49 : 2 2006 Astor is very much like a play with the two principal actors giving most of the good speeches but with minor characters such as Shaw's secretary, Blanche Patch, making significant contributions to the conversation and with colorful supernumeraries providing intrigue. The pertinent and concise annotations—extremely well done by J. P. Wearing —resemble lively stage directions. But what makes for compelling drama: the lacunae of missing letters; the intervals between letters; the almost randomness of those moments in their lives when the correspondents connected; the backdrop of World War II (both the run up to the war and its aftermath) but in unconnected glimpses; the suspense of issues that go unresolved over the course of several months of letters ? The reader then is forced to discover the implied motives, underlying emotions, and hidden links, and therein lies the drama. The Astor-Shaw letters contribute to the public record as follows: of the 229 letters, 135 are published for the first time, and 37 make their unabridged debut. They record the quirky views and personalities of the correspondents with much vitality. Some of Shaw's views repulse strongly now. For example, before he set off with Lady Astor for their trip to the Soviet Union, Shaw wrote to Nancy's husband, Waldorf (27 June 1931), expressing his skepticism about the reports of Stalin's state terrorism: "As we wish to see the torture chamber of the Tcheka, he [Sokolnikoff, the Soviet ambassador to Britain] should warn them to have a victim or two ready, so that we may witness the process." Shaw's flippancy here is meant to convey his confidence that no such torture chambers...