‘I am not at all interesting biographically’, Shaw once claimed (SSS 5). Of course, this is untrue, as is evidenced by the many and varied Shaw biographies that continue to attract both readers and controversy. However, the more one reads about Shaw's life, the easier it is to see that the whole enterprise is more complex, more subjective, and more related to fiction than is usually supposed by readers of Shaw's biographies, most of whom just want to know the shaping forces of his life and times, what he was like as a person, what effect, if any, he had (and is still having) on the zeitgeist, and why these questions remain so significant that people are hotly debating them more than six decades after his death.

Although Shaw has been widely criticised for sleight of hand and subterfuge in his attempts to write about his own life, it is only fair to note that he frankly declared autobiography to be an inherently pointless exercise. In an essay he wrote in 1898, later published in Sixteen Self Sketches, Shaw announced that ‘[a]ll autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies. No man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving, as it must, the truth about his family and his friends and colleagues’. He added: ‘If I were to attempt to write genuine autobiography here … I should give mortal offence to the few relatives who would know that I was writing the truth; and nobody else would believe me’ (SSS 43). Shaw did periodically yield to autobiographical pressures both external and internal – that is, external pressures from those who wanted to know his story and his own compulsion to tell his own story in his own way – but he warned that most of the material would be quite mundane, experiences shared by most of humanity. Furthermore, he padded his own story ‘to relieve the dullness’ with ‘tales of my relatives which must be read as ordinary fiction, the Irish Family Shaw having been occasionally funnier than the Swiss Family Robinson’ (SSS 8).