T. S. Eliot’s Critique of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan: Modernism and Bibliographical Errors

Michael Holroyd, in his monumental four-volume biography of Bernard Shaw, quotes one of T. S. Eliot's editorials in The Criterion, where he criticizes Shaw for having created ' perhaps the greatest sacrilege of all Joans: for instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends to which he objects, he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer, and her place is a little higher than Mrs Pankhurst'. This quotation is again reproduced in Holroyd's abridged biography, Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition, with the context of the discussion also being reproduced almost verbatim, although no reference to Eliot's article is provided this time. Several Shaw scholars have used Holroyd's biographies as a secondary source for Eliot's article in The Criterion in their studies on Saint Joan.