Saint Joan

<p class=ql-align-justify>The life of fifteenth-century heroine Joan of Arc is the stuff of legend and her cruel death (burnt at the stake aged just nineteen) led to her being declared a martyr granting her an extraordinary legacy.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Following her canonisation in 1920 and against a history of overly romanticised retellings of the story Bernard Shaw put pen to paper to give a more accurate account without resorting to demonising her persecutors; as he writes in his preface 'there are no villains in the piece'.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>It was an immediate success securing him the Nobel Prize for Literature although critics were initially divided by this frank approach - T.S. Eliot was outraged saying 'instead of the saint or the strumpet of the legends... he has turned her into a great middle-class reformer.' Nonetheless - or perhaps even because of this controversy - <em>Saint Joan</em> is considered one of Shaw's finest and most important plays.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>This edition has an introduction by Simon Mundy who has spent several years as Vice-President of PEN International's Writers for Peace Committee and extensive explanatory notes.</p><p><br></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>'</span>He was a Tolstoy with jokes a modern Dr Johnson a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.' - <em>The Independent</em></p>