George Bernard Shaw:
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

Notes & references
compiled by Ralph Dumain

SOURCE: Shaw, George Bernard. The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, designed and engraved by John Farleigh. London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1932. (Afterword: pp. 59-75.) New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1933. (Plain text)

Wikipedia:

The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

George Bernard Shaw

Essential history:

Hugo, Leon. Bernard Shaw’s the Black Girl in Search of God: The Story Behind the Story. London: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Additional references:

Carter, Jessie. George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God [review], The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 20, No. 4, October 1935, pp. 491-493.

Dukore, Bernard F. “Racism and Shaw,” Shaw, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2021, pp. 6-34.

Harris, Mark. “Shaw Speaks of the Negro,” Negro Digest 8 (February 1950): 52-55.

Hugo, Leon H. “‘The Black Girl’ and Some Lesser Quests: 1932-1934,” Shaw 9 (1989): 161–84.

Larson, Gale K. “Shaw’s Black Girl: Layers of Ideas” [review of Leon Hugo], Shaw, Vol. 24, 2004 (Dionysian Shaw), pp. 236-242.

Manista, Frank C. ‘“The Gulf of Dislike" Between Reality and Resemblance in Bernard Shaw’s “The Black Girl In Search Of God”,’ Shaw, Vol. 23, 2003, pp. 117-135.

Morrow, Sean. “The Missionary in The Black Girl,” Shaw, Vol. 6, 1986, pp. 5-12.

Mouloud Siber, “Gender and Race in the Eyes of George Bernard Shaw,” Revue Campus 15 (September 2009): 31-41.

Newell, Stephanie. Ghanaian Popular Fiction: “Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life” & Other Tales (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), “An Incident of Colonial Intertextuality: The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for Mr Shaw,” pp. 70-87.

Reddick, Lawrence D. “Shaw’s Black Girl,” Opportunity 11 (October 1933): 314 (“Our Bookshelf” column).

Smith, Warren Sylvester. “The Adventures of Shaw, the Nun, and the Black Girl,” Shaw, Vol. 1 (Shaw and Religion), 1981, pp. 205-222.

Sparks, Julie A. “Shaw for the Utopians, Čapek for the Anti-Utopians,” Shaw, Vol. 17 (Shaw and Science Fiction), 1997, pp. 165-183.

I don’t remember what sparked my journey down this rabbit hole, but it was the evening of June 11 when this book I had read decades before popped into my head. I had found the 1933 American edition of this novella in the basement of a rare book dealer I knew situated a couple of blocks from me in Buffalo and bought it for $4. As it was first published in Britain in 1932, this would not have been a first edition, hence it ended up in the bargain basement.

I have a record of reading The Black Girl on July 9, 1979. What else was I reading? I remember 1979 as the year I got more into the background of my favorite poet William Blake and thus into the broader realm of English Romanticism. I was also reading my newly favorite science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. It was the summer of 1980 when I read the works of Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance, and African novels.

I remembered only bits and pieces of the plot, but it was unique and unforgettable. I surmise that few people casually exposed to Shaw in school, the theater, or in general reading have heard of The Black Girl.

The novella pits an intelligent, inquisitive, and assertive African girl who recapitulates the history of religion on a quest seeking satisfactory answers, making mincemeat of her white interlocutors and hitting some of them with her walking stick, until she comes across a Shavian surrogate who offers his heterodox vitalist view of creative evolution and socialism. The Black girl settles down, marries an Irishman, and they produce coffee-colored children.

Shaw caught hell for this book. I did not know this, nor did I know anything else of its backstory. I was now off on a quest.

My first destination was Leon Hugo’s book. The author goes into depth into the possible influences and germination of the idea for Shaw’s novella. Voltaire was a huge influence. The book was prompted by and written during Shaw’s visit to South Africa in 1932. He was feted as a celebrity and a humorist, though it was known that he might have some contrary thoughts about South Africa’s colonial social order. A nationwide radio network was jerry-rigged for the first time in South Africa, so everyone with access could hear Shaw speak. He began and ended politely, and in the middle he denounced South Africa’s racism, calling South Africa a slave society, and predicting the ultimate demise of white civilization. Here’s a taste:

If white civilization breaks down through idleness and loafing based on slavery—and remember that modern historical research has discovered that half a dozen civilizations like ours have broken down through just that canker in them—then, as likely as not, the next great civilization will be a negro civilization. Anyhow, black or white, it will be built up by workers, not by parasite ladies and gentlemen.

Another factor in writing this book was Shaw’s scorn for Christian missionaries (though he befriended one Mabel Shaw), whose priorities and behavior were themselves suspect, condescendingly inflicting their religion on native Africans. All this came together in Shaw’s 1932 novella, which portrays the African girl both physically and intellectually superior to the whites she encounters. It was denounced in the British press and banned in Ireland, and prompted many books by others taking off on Shaw’s. Shaw was reviewed rather differently in the African American press.

The scholarly literature expands on Shaw’s themes. I did not know that throughout Shaw’s career he railed against white supremacy―the racism perpetrated by the British especially in Africa and India, the lynch mob racism in the USA, and antisemitism, too. Furthermore, Shaw was an adamant advocate of intermarriage, thought that Black people were more physically attractive than ‘pinks’ (whites), asserted that the whites were in no position to ‘improve’ Black people, that Africans would do just fine once liberated from white domination, and that the more indolent white imperialists became in forcing their colonized people do all their work for them, the weaker they will become, to be replaced by a ‘negro civilization’. (See quote above.) Shaw’s last interview on the subject was published in the American periodical Negro Digest in 1950.

Written 11-14 June 2026