Love Among The Artists

A spirited early novel of Shaw's, offering shrewd insight into the nature of the artistic temperament with inimitable wit and sparkle

George Bernard Shaw brings us the character of Owen Jack, a salty nonconformist composer said to have been suggested by Beethoven. The relations between Jack and the other wayward bohemians of the story with the more conventional socialites around them offers shrewd insight into the nature of the artistic temperament, with its needs for a kind of commitment that overrides the everyday claims of the heart. Anticipating Shaw's first plays by more than 10 years, this novel shows him already mocking the respectable morality of the Victorian society around him.