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G. B.S. BORROWS FROM SARAH GRAND: THE HEAVENLY 'Iff/INS AND YOU NEVER CAN TELL "They call us the Heavenly Twins." "What, signs of the Zodiac?" ... "N0, signs of the times," said the Boy G.B.S. SELDOM INTERRUPTED a theater review to tout a work of fiction; yet three times early in 1895 he went out of his way to praise Sarah Grand's three-volume novel The Heavenly Twins (1893).1 That July he began writing You Never Can Tell) a play which suggests that he had not put the Victorian tri-decker out of his mind as one might have forgotten most mawkish and melodramatic contemporary fiction. The difference seems to have been that Sarah Grand (actually Mrs. Frances Elizabeth McFall) concocted not only preposterously plotted mixtures of Trollope and Mrs. Braddon, but included what appeared to be heady doses of Ibsen. George Meredith had turned down the ms. for Chapman and Hall, reporting that the young authoress "had ideas," but could not "drive a story." There was nothing of the New Realism in its structure or its style, but Heinemann, the next publisher to see it, was new in the business, and nervous about its frankness . He consulted his friend Sydney Pawling, a manager of the Mudie bookshop lending library chain and nephew of the founder, since Mudie's purchasing power (and its implicit censorship in refusing to exercise it) was still able to make or break a novel. Pawling more than approved of it: he even became a partner in the Heinemann firm-just in time to cash in on the tremendous success The Heavenly Twins was to have in the libraries and bookstalls. Shaw's remarks through 1894 and 1895 make it clear that he had not completely given up reading forgettable three-volume novels when he was able to afford to give up fiction-reviewing for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1888. Apparently having already read The Heavenly Twins} Shaw in a letter to young critic Golding Bright on November 19, 1894, put Madame Grand (already publicly known as an ardent feminist) in company with Ibsen, Whistler2 and Wagner as having 1 All quotations from the novel are from the first edition, 3 vols., London, 1893. 2 Whistler recalled once meeting Sarah Grand at a dinner party after she had returned from some weeks in France-where Madame Grand started the evening by complaining that Frenchmen could never forget that women are women. She liked to meet men as comrades-without their constant awareness of her sex. Whistler's comment-he reported-was, "Certainly the Englishwoman succeeds, 288 1971 G.B.S. BORROWS FROM SARAH GRAND 289 "a touch of genius."3 In January, 1895 he again referred to her in that vein, this time publicly, in a theatre column in the Saturday Review.4 Reviewing Dorothy Leighton's Thyrza Fleming~ he observed that it was "a courageous attempt at a counterblast to The Heavenly Twins." But, he concluded, The contest between l\1iss Leighton's talent and Sarah Grand's genius is an unequal one; and the play evades the challenged issue in a sufficiently ridiculous way. Sarah Grand's heroine married a gentleman with "a past"; discovered it on her wedding day; and promptly went home, treating him exactly as he would have been conventionally expected to treat her under like circumstances . To this Miss Leighton says, in effect: "Let me show you what a frightful mistake it is for a woman to take such a step." She accordingly creates a heroine who leaves her husband on their wedding day, and presently returns repentant to confess that she was wrong, the proof being that her husband is really a blameless gentleman with no past at all. In a column in March, discussing the stage censorship by the Lord Chamberlain's Office, he wondered whether Grant Allen's notorious novel The liVoman Who Did would have been licensed "if it had been a play, or whether The Heavenly Twins could have been written under the thumb of a Censor. . . ."5 Again in May, in discussing works which were serious criticisms of life, he soberly equated "The Heavenly Twins and Ibsen's...

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