and
Beatrice Webb (foreground) In April 1898, Shaw had an accident; he was living at 29
Fitzroy Square with his mother. According to Shaw his left foot swelled up "to the size of a church bell". He wrote to Charlotte complaining that he was unable to walk. When she heard the news she travelled back to visit him at his home. Soon after she arrived on 1 May she arranged for him to go into hospital. Shaw had an operation that scraped the necrosed bone clean. Charlotte married Shaw on 1 June 1898, while he was recuperating from surgery. He was nearly forty-two; she was six months younger. The couple resided at first at 10 Adelphi Terrace, London, overlooking the Embankment. In the view of the biographer and critic
St John Ervine, "their life together was entirely felicitous". Their marriage is generally believed never to have been consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited. However, according to
Michael Holroyd they had a "careful sexual experience". Charlotte soon made herself almost indispensable to Shaw. She learnt to read his shorthand and to type, took dictation and helped him prepare his plays for the press. In 1906, the couple moved into a house, now called
Shaw's Corner, in
Ayot St. Lawrence, a small village in
Hertfordshire. They also maintained a
pied-à-terre in Fitzroy Square, London, and travelled the world extensively during the 1930s. According to Shaw's friend
Archibald Henderson Shaw's 1933 play
A Village Wooing is based on their courtship. The play is about a writer and a woman who meet on a cruise but only become a couple when they develop a working relationship: She died from
Paget's disease in 1943, and was cremated at
Golders Green Crematorium, where her ashes were kept until Shaw's death in 1950. Their ashes were taken to Shaw's Corner, mixed and then scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden. == Publications ==