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Saint Joan — George Bernard Shaw
Full Title: Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue
George Bernard Shaw
Constable and Company Ltd. · London · 1924
First Edition · First Printing
The Book:
The first edition, first printing of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue, published by Constable and Company in London in 1924. Written shortly after Joan of Arc’s 1920 canonization, Shaw’s play reinterpreted her conflict with church and state through questions of individual conscience, institutional authority, nationalism, and judgment. Original light gray publisher’s cloth with gilt spine lettering. The original dust jacket is not present.
Condition:
Near Fine. The original light gray cloth remains exceptionally clean and the binding square and tight, with bright gilt spine lettering and remarkably fresh pages. Light uniform toning is present to the endpapers, with only minor rubbing at the spine ends and corners. No ownership inscriptions, bookplates, foxing, restoration, or structural defects are observed. The final publisher’s advertisement leaf remains present. Lacking the original dust jacket.
Story Of The Book
George Bernard Shaw was interested in a disturbing historical pattern: societies often learn to revere the people they once found intolerable.
Joan of Arc had been canonized only a few years before Shaw wrote Saint Joan. But rather than simply celebrating the newly recognized saint, Shaw returned to the young woman who had been tried, condemned, and burned nearly five centuries earlier.
His Joan is formidable because she thinks for herself. She trusts her own judgment, challenges military assumptions, bypasses established hierarchies, and claims an authority that neither church nor state can comfortably control.
That makes her collision with institutions central to the play. Shaw refuses to make her judges simple monsters. Instead, he asks how intelligent people working within institutions they believe legitimate can participate in destroying an individual whose independence threatens the order those institutions exist to preserve.
The unsettling question is not why evil people killed Joan. It is how reasonable institutions convinced themselves that killing her was reasonable.
The epilogue completes Shaw’s argument by moving beyond Joan’s death to her rehabilitation and eventual sainthood. History reverses the judgment—but Shaw leaves the audience with a harder question about whether society would actually tolerate another Joan if she appeared.
Why It’s In The Collection
Saint Joan belongs in Consigned to Darkness because the persecution of dissent does not always begin with authorities believing themselves unjust.
Joan’s conflict with power is complicated precisely because the institutions confronting her possess rules, traditions, procedures, and sincere claims to legitimacy. Shaw uses her story to examine what happens when an individual conscience refuses to fit comfortably inside them.
Published only four years after Joan’s canonization, this 1924 first edition preserves Shaw’s intervention at a remarkable historical moment: the institution that had once condemned Joan had formally declared her a saint, while Shaw was asking audiences to reconsider how institutions decide which voices are dangerous in the first place.
A society can build statues to yesterday’s dissenter while remaining perfectly capable of condemning the next one.
Collection Categories: Literature · Drama · Religious Conscience · Anti-Authoritarianism
———
Authentication Evidence
Title page identifies Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue by Bernard Shaw.
Title page bears the Constable and Company Ltd., London, 1924 publisher imprint.
Copyright page bears the 1924 copyright and printer’s statement, with no later-printing designation observed.
Printer is identified as R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh, consistent with documented copies of the original Constable edition.
Independent bibliographic records identify the 1924 Constable publication as the first book edition of Saint Joan.
No subsequent-impression, revised-edition, or later-edition statement appears in the observed preliminary matter.
Original publisher’s light gray cloth binding with gilt spine lettering is present and corresponds to documented first-edition copies.
Final publisher’s advertisement leaf listing Shaw’s works remains present.
Typography, page layout, publisher imprint, and binding construction are internally consistent with the original Constable publication.
No evidence of rebinding, facsimile leaves, book-club manufacture, ex-library provenance, or other later-issue characteristics is observed.
Taken together, the 1924 Constable imprint, original publisher’s binding, printer information, advertisement leaf, and absence of a later-printing designation support identification as an authentic 1924 First Edition · First Printing.
Full Title: Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue
George Bernard Shaw
Constable and Company Ltd. · London · 1924
First Edition · First Printing
The Book:
The first edition, first printing of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue, published by Constable and Company in London in 1924. Written shortly after Joan of Arc’s 1920 canonization, Shaw’s play reinterpreted her conflict with church and state through questions of individual conscience, institutional authority, nationalism, and judgment. Original light gray publisher’s cloth with gilt spine lettering. The original dust jacket is not present.
Condition:
Near Fine. The original light gray cloth remains exceptionally clean and the binding square and tight, with bright gilt spine lettering and remarkably fresh pages. Light uniform toning is present to the endpapers, with only minor rubbing at the spine ends and corners. No ownership inscriptions, bookplates, foxing, restoration, or structural defects are observed. The final publisher’s advertisement leaf remains present. Lacking the original dust jacket.
Story Of The Book
George Bernard Shaw was interested in a disturbing historical pattern: societies often learn to revere the people they once found intolerable.
Joan of Arc had been canonized only a few years before Shaw wrote Saint Joan. But rather than simply celebrating the newly recognized saint, Shaw returned to the young woman who had been tried, condemned, and burned nearly five centuries earlier.
His Joan is formidable because she thinks for herself. She trusts her own judgment, challenges military assumptions, bypasses established hierarchies, and claims an authority that neither church nor state can comfortably control.
That makes her collision with institutions central to the play. Shaw refuses to make her judges simple monsters. Instead, he asks how intelligent people working within institutions they believe legitimate can participate in destroying an individual whose independence threatens the order those institutions exist to preserve.
The unsettling question is not why evil people killed Joan. It is how reasonable institutions convinced themselves that killing her was reasonable.
The epilogue completes Shaw’s argument by moving beyond Joan’s death to her rehabilitation and eventual sainthood. History reverses the judgment—but Shaw leaves the audience with a harder question about whether society would actually tolerate another Joan if she appeared.
Why It’s In The Collection
Saint Joan belongs in Consigned to Darkness because the persecution of dissent does not always begin with authorities believing themselves unjust.
Joan’s conflict with power is complicated precisely because the institutions confronting her possess rules, traditions, procedures, and sincere claims to legitimacy. Shaw uses her story to examine what happens when an individual conscience refuses to fit comfortably inside them.
Published only four years after Joan’s canonization, this 1924 first edition preserves Shaw’s intervention at a remarkable historical moment: the institution that had once condemned Joan had formally declared her a saint, while Shaw was asking audiences to reconsider how institutions decide which voices are dangerous in the first place.
A society can build statues to yesterday’s dissenter while remaining perfectly capable of condemning the next one.
Collection Categories: Literature · Drama · Religious Conscience · Anti-Authoritarianism
———
Authentication Evidence
Title page identifies Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue by Bernard Shaw.
Title page bears the Constable and Company Ltd., London, 1924 publisher imprint.
Copyright page bears the 1924 copyright and printer’s statement, with no later-printing designation observed.
Printer is identified as R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh, consistent with documented copies of the original Constable edition.
Independent bibliographic records identify the 1924 Constable publication as the first book edition of Saint Joan.
No subsequent-impression, revised-edition, or later-edition statement appears in the observed preliminary matter.
Original publisher’s light gray cloth binding with gilt spine lettering is present and corresponds to documented first-edition copies.
Final publisher’s advertisement leaf listing Shaw’s works remains present.
Typography, page layout, publisher imprint, and binding construction are internally consistent with the original Constable publication.
No evidence of rebinding, facsimile leaves, book-club manufacture, ex-library provenance, or other later-issue characteristics is observed.
Taken together, the 1924 Constable imprint, original publisher’s binding, printer information, advertisement leaf, and absence of a later-printing designation support identification as an authentic 1924 First Edition · First Printing.