[Lillah McCarthy [Lady Keeble], actress.] Typescript, with a few autograph emendations, of commencement of a radio talk [given in Argentina?], telling stories about George Moore and George Bernard Shaw from her autobiography 'Myself and My Friends'.

Author: 
Lillah McCarthy [Lady Keeble] (1875-1960), actress associated with Bernard Shaw and her husband Harley Granville-Barker [Leslie Mead, Director, Argentine Association of British Culture, Buenos Aires]
Publication details: 
[After the publication of her autobiography in 1933. Argentina?]
£80.00
SKU: 22279

Carbon typescript. 4pp, 4to. Paginated 1-4. In fair condition, aged and worn, with chipping to edges. The text concerns George Moore and Bernard Shaw, but the introduction suggests that this is the start of a longer piece: 'I will give Mr. Mead, who has done such fine work and who has been so energetic in developing the work of the Associacion de Cultura Inglesa, the full particulars of the E. V. S. A., [i.e. English Verse Speaking Association] and I hope that you will all become Members.' | Mr. Mead has asked me to include in my Radio Programme today, a few short notes from my book entitled “Myself and My Friends” [published in London in 1933] And as my “Friends” include such Poets as John Masefield, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, and brilliant Dramatists as George Bernard Shaw, Sir James Barrie, and great Novelists as John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and even that great explorer Nansen, I feld that could not refuse Mr. Mead's request.' At this point, in McCarthy's autograph: 'The first words of my book are:'. The next paragraph is a transcription of the start of the book. It is followed by loose transcriptions and paraphrases of stories from the book, occasionally lightly reworked with linking passages, comprising reminiscences of her early acquaintance with 'George Moore, the great Irish Novelist, and George Bernard Shaw, the great Irish dramatist'. Both men were present during her first success, in an amateur production of 'Macbeth'. Moore, 'the first to hold out his hand', invites her to his house to discuss a play of his; her father will only allow her to talk to him on the doorstep. Shaw sees her performance from the front row, as drama critic for the Sunday Review. He invites her to play the female lead in 'Man and Superman': 'The romantic dramas in which I had played for 10 years were passing out of fashion, and Bernard Shaw and Sir James Barrie were the two pioneers who restored the English theatre to its right place in national life, and when I played “Ann Whitefield” in “Man and Superman”, this new woman made a new woman of me.' The last page ends: 'Shaw was the Perseus who rescued Andromeda from the talons of the dragon!'