Black and white photo of Charlotte Payne-Townshend.
“Even in my earliest years I had determined I would never marry.”
– Charlotte Payne-Townshend
As described by her friend Beatrice Webb, Charlotte Payne-Townshend was “an anarchist – feeling any regulation or rule is intolerable – a tendency which has been exaggerated by her intolerable wealth. She is romantic but thinks herself cynical. She is a socialist and a radical, but not because she understands collectivist standpoint, but because she is by nature a rebel. She has no snobbishness and no convention. She has ‘swallowed all formulas’ but has not worked out principles of her own. She is fond of men and impatient of most women – bitterly resents her enforced celibacy but thinks she could not tolerate the matter of fact side of marriage. Sweet tempered, sympathetic and genuinely anxious to increase the world’s enjoyment and diminish the world’s pain.” With a description like this, it is disappointing how often her life gets written off as the wife of famous playwright George Bernard Shaw.
Born on the 20th of January 1857, Charlotte grew up in a wealthy Irish household. Her mother’s grand ambition for Charlotte was to marry her off. However, viewing her parents’ marriage in all its dysfunctional glory from a young age, Charlotte decided that this was not a path she intended to follow. She later said, “Even in my earliest years, I had determined I would never marry.” Instead, she began to pursue more intellectual and political avenues.
During her travels around Europe, Charlotte would join the Fabian society, which would give her the first taste of the activism that she would spend her life on. A fierce feminist, socialist, anarchist, who campaigned for Irish independence, Charlotte soon became a well-known figure in the equally political George Bernard Shaw’s circle.
Their initial meeting began with a series of unfortunate circumstances that kept their mutual friends from spending the holidays together. Instead, Shaw and Charlotte met and spent the first days alone. In a letter, Shaw described the time, writing:
“Instead of going to bed at ten, we go out and stroll about among the trees for a while. She, being also Irish, does not succumb to my arts as the unsuspecting and literal Englishwoman does; but we get on together all the better, repairing bicycles, talking philosophy and religion... or, when we are in a mischievous or sentimental humor, philandering shamelessly and outrageously.”
Up until this point, Charlotte had been almost entirely steadfast in her avoidance of romantic entanglements outside of one failed relationship. She was not only single but famously independent. However, with Shaw, her initial declaration to avoid marriage went out the window. Soon after their meeting, she proposed to the man.
This initial proposal was rejected by Shaw, as he was afraid that people would see the marriage as an attempt from him to get his hands on her money. After the rejection, Charlotte decided to travel to get him off her mind. However, when she found out through letters that he had been hurt, she quickly returned and forced him to seek treatment.
Though Shaw would later say he was foggy on how it had happened, he ended up proposing to her this time, a proposal she accepted happily. A part of this marriage was a contract drawn up by the couple themselves, planning out boundaries and rules for their oncoming relationship. Within this contract was the stipulation that they would not have a sexual relationship.
It is reported that for a brief time, they experimented with a sexual relationship. However, Charlotte found herself remarkably uninterested in it.
Because their marriage was famously celibate, there has been speculation that Shaw was aromantic and asexual and Charlotte asexual. While it is clear that Charlotte was not interested in a sexual aspect of their relationship, that does not automatically mean Shaw was also asexual. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:
“I associated [sexual intercourse] always with delight, and had no scruples nor remorses nor misgivings of conscience. . . . I tried all the experiments and learned what there was to be learnt from them. They were “all for love”; for I had no spare money.”
He also had extramarital relationships with several women, implying that he experienced some degree of both sexual and romantic attraction.
Among his many plays, Shaw would often draw on parallels and experiences from his personal life. Charlotte was a significant source of inspiration for him. The relationships he wrote based on his own had a repeated dynamic of the Charlotte character not being interested in sex, while the Shaw character was.
In Good King Charles, the play most obviously based on his and Charlotte’s relationship, the character representing him apologizes for his affairs, the character representing Charlotte responds:
“What care I about your women? your concubines? your handmaidens? the servants of your common pleasure? They have set me free to be something more to you than they are or can ever be. You have never really been unfaithful to me.”
“What wise man, if you force him to choose between doing without roses and doing without cabbages, would not secure the cabbages?”
In his writing, one sees evidence that he did experience romantic love towards Charlotte, in his letters, and his varied loving portrayals of her spanning through many plays, one of which addresses his relationships with other women from his perspective. Take, for example, the possibly true situation in which a woman with whom he considered running away stood him up. He rewrites the exchange with his character deciding to stay with his wife and confront the other woman. The woman responds saying:
“Heaven is offering you a rose; and you cling to a cabbage.”
The man responds:
“What wise man, if you force him to choose between doing without roses and doing without cabbages, would not secure the cabbages? Besides all these old married cabbages were once roses; and though young things like you don’t remember that, their husbands do . . .”
It may not be the most poetic declaration of love, but it is one he felt true.
Neither Shaw's affairs, relationships, or art necessarily mean that he could not be asexual or aromantic. However, if one had to choose a label to describe his expressed experiences, it would seem to lie closer to the label demisexual than anything else. He often mentions love as a necessary component for sex. The women with whom he had sexual relationships were not strangers; they built relationships and formed emotional bonds.
It is Charlotte's case, which is the most clear-cut. She supported open discussion of sexuality, likely because she knew that her attitude towards sex was neither universal nor original. She had a close friendship with writer T.E. Lawrence, who is also theorized to be asexual. They may have known they shared this lack of sexual interest.
Charlotte had a deeper interest in Shaw's work and learned his shorthand to help him dictate his works for him. There is also evidence that she would do research and even suggested topics for Shaw's plays. Unfortunately, like many women in history, her contributions to her famous husband's work seem to be largely forgotten.
Even in the things she did without Shaw, his shadow hangs over her legacy. She donated one thousand pounds for a university to develop a library which she specified would have "the most exhaustive and daring range of subjects." When the university wanted to name the library after her, she wrote back:
"Reward me by keeping my connection with it absolutely private as is possible under the circumstances. I have already had to excuse myself for refusing to have my portrait painted and hung in the Founders' Room at the School. I am abnormally & ridiculously averse from publicity and like to work in the dark, like a mole! So please help me. We must find some nice name to call the library by. Perhaps G.B.S. can invent something."
When the board pressed, suggesting a compromise in naming the library The Shaw Library, she responded:
"It is curious & very nice isn't it that the right name should have come like this – of itself so to speak. Because there can be no doubt that this 'The Shaw Library' is the absolutely right name – so short, so convenient, so satisfactory. So 'The Shaw Library' let it be."
Because of this name, library-goers often assume the building is named after her husband rather than herself. Though considering her express wishes, it is difficult to hold this against anyone.
She supported feminist publications, attempted to get German support to free Ireland from British rule, worked as a translator, marched in the Boston Suffragette parade in 1914, and spent much of her time fighting for equal rights for all. In this fight, she was exposed to many ideas that were not commonly discussed in her time and place. One such discussion was that of polyamorous relationships.
Shaw's plays again may draw from reality here. Charlotte's insert character says to him, "What care I about your women? your concubines? your handmaidens? the servants of your common pleasure? They have set me free to be something more to you than they are or can ever be. You have never really been unfaithful to me."
Charlotte may have been open to Shaw having relationships with other women. So what seemed to the outside world numerous affairs might have been an unwritten stipulation in their shared contract. However, even if that were the case, it would seem that Shaw felt waves of guilt for the situation. Whether that be due to hurting the woman he loved or because he was defying a profoundly ingrained social convention.
It is clear that the two loved each other deeply and would spend the rest of their lives happily married. Though Shaw and Charlotte never had biological children, they did have a family, as historian Stanley Weintraub wrote:
"Childless, they indulged in surrogate sons and daughters whose children often went to school on quiet Shavian largess. Granville Barker and Lillah McCarthy had their Royal Court and Savoy seasons underwritten by G.B.S., who lost, unconcernedly, all his investment."
Charlotte had unfortunately experienced many years of chronic pain due to osteitis deformans, which eventually led to her death at age eighty-six in September 1943. Her husband would follow her only seven years after. Upon Shaw's death, his ashes would be mixed with Charlotte's and scattered in their shared garden.
When the language was imperfect or nonexistent, people still spoke, still looked for others like them. Connecting in new ways, loving in infinite ways, all as beautiful as the next. All because someone reached out and explained themselves, and someone else understood.
The limitations of time are a constant barrier in the study of queer history. This is even more so the case with asexuality. It has been ignored, pushed aside, hidden, and removed from history with great ease. This is partly because it is a newer word and because it is a sexuality that one can act on without ever revealing it to be the reason for the actions.
However, sexuality has always been more than action. It is deeper than that. Over and over, new ways to articulate old experiences crop up. Old maids, spinsters, spare women, ways to distance some of us from the rest, all turned to ways of like finding like. When the language was imperfect or nonexistent, people still spoke, still looked for others like them. Connecting in new ways, loving in infinite ways, all as beautiful as the next. All because someone reached out and explained themselves, and someone else understood. In the brave journey of creating language, people have found each other. While the word asexual did not exist yet, together, Lawrence, Shaw, and Charlotte found each other, and an asexual community began.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
“A handsome Valentine”: May Morris’s love letter to George Bernard Shaw. (2017, February 14). The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/feb/14/a-handsome-valentine-may-morriss-love-letter-to-george-bernard-shaw
An, J. (2016, May 20). BIOGRAPHY: Charlotte Payne-Townshend. The Heroine Collective. http://www.theheroinecollective.com/charlotte-payne-townshend/
Charlotte Payne-Townshend – Conway Hall. (n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2021, from https://conwayhall.org.uk/the-a2r-blog/charlotte-payne-townshend/
Charlotte Payne-Townshend 1867. (n.d.). Retrieved May 24, 2021, from https://irelandxo.com/ireland-xo/history-and-genealogy/ancestor-database/charlotte-payne-townshend
Charlotte Payne-Townshend Shaw. (n.d.). Spartacus Educational. Retrieved May 24, 2021, from https://spartacus-educational.com/WshawC.htm
Donnelly, S. (2014, January 24). An unsung heroine of LSE – Charlotte Shaw. LSE History. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2014/01/24/an-unsung-heroine-of-lse-charlotte-payne-townshend/
Dooney, E. (n.d.). One-woman play tells tale of the overlooked wife of George Bernard Shaw. The Irish Post. Retrieved May 24, 2021, from https://www.irishpost.com/entertainment/one-woman-play-tells-tale-overlooked-wife-george-bernard-shaw-177799
L, A. & says: (2015, August 13). Charlotte Shaw’s legacy – the Shaw Library. LSE History. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2015/08/13/charlotte-shaws-legacy-the-shaw-library/
Webb, B. (1990). A Disturbing Friendship. In A. M. Gibbs (Ed.), Shaw (pp. 168–170). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05402-2_90
Weintraub, R. (1980). The Irish Lady in Shaw’s Plays. Penn State University Press, 23(2), 77–89.