"Dame Joan, Saint Christabel"

Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan in 1923. His immediate impetus was the canonization of Joan of Arc on 16 May 1920, during a time of power politicking hard upon the horrors of the Great War. The irony of Joan's elevation five hundred years after her death amidst forces she would have opposed but had helped put into play was too great a temptation for Shaw to resist. On a domestic level, Shaw's wife, Charlotte, too insisted upon a role in the work's progress. In the face of her husband's initial resistance, she claimed to have strategically placed books on Joan around the house where Shaw was bound to see them, read them, and thus stimulated, embark upon the play she wanted him to write. Others have explained Shaw's attraction to the figure of Joan as part of a personal religious pilgrimage, one characterized by G.K. Chesterton as consisting, in the first instance, of Shaw "running away from a religion," and in the second of his "running after one.”