This is the first volume of the authorized three-volume life of George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, wit, socialist, vegetarian and polemicist. It covers the first 41 years of his life, from his birth and childhood in Dublin to his marriage in 1898 to the Irish heiress and fellow socialist, Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Having followed his mother to London, tried his hand as a novelist, become a controversial theatre critic and a founder member of the Fabian Society, won fame as an outspoken music critic and struck up friendships and rivalries with the Webbs, William Morris, Frank Harris, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Eleanor Marx, he begins to establish his reputation as one of the best-known dramatists in English since Shakespeare. The biographer, Michael Holroyd has also written Hugh Kingsmill, Lytton Strachey and Augustus John.