Editing George Bernard Shaw (section)

===Novelist and critic===
The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic.{{sfn|Holroyd|1997|pp=72, 81 and 94}} He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior.{{sfn|Holroyd|1997|pp=92–94}} Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life has caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons.{{refn|Some writers, including Lisbeth J. Sachs, Bernard Stern and Sally Peters, believe Shaw was a repressed homosexual, and that after Jenny Patterson all his relationships with women, including his marriage, were platonic.{{sfn|Peters|1996|p=289}} Others, such as [[Maurice Valency]], suggest that at least one other of Shaw's relationships—that with [[Florence Farr]]—was consummated.{{sfn|Valency|1973|p=89}} Evidence came to light in 2004 that a well-documented relationship between the septuagenarian Shaw and the young actress Molly Tompkins was not, as had been generally supposed, platonic.{{sfn|Owen|2004|p=3}} Shaw himself stressed his own heterosexuality to [[St. John Greer Ervine|St John Ervine]] ("I am the normal heterosexual man") and [[Frank Harris]] ("I was not impotent: I was not sterile; I was not homosexual; and I was extremely, though not promiscuously, susceptible").{{sfn|Peters|1996|p=171}}|group=n}}

The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: ''Cashel Byron's Profession'' written in 1882–83, and ''An Unsocial Socialist'', begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in ''To-Day'' magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. ''Cashel Byron'' appeared in magazine and book form in 1886.{{sfn|Weintraub|2013}}

[[File:William-Morris-John-Ruskin.jpg|thumb|alt=Two elderly, bushily bearded, Victorian men|[[William Morris]] (left) and [[John Ruskin]]: important influences on Shaw's aesthetic views]]

In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of ''[[The World (journal)|The World]]'' in 1886, he secured the succession for Shaw.{{sfn|Holroyd|1997|pp=81–83}} The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were [[William Morris]] and [[John Ruskin]], and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms.{{sfn|Holroyd|1997|pp=81–83}} Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of [[art for art's sake]], and insisted that all great art must be [[didactic]].{{sfn|Crawford|1982|pp=21 and 23}}

Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known.{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 1) 1981|p=22}} After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of ''[[The Star (1888)|The Star]]'' in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto.{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 1) 1981|pp=16–17}}{{refn|A corno di bassetto is the Italian name for an obsolete musical instrument, the [[basset horn]]. Shaw chose it as his pen name because he thought it seemed dashing: "it sounded like a foreign title and nobody knew what a corno di bassetto was". Only later did he hear one played, after which he declared it "a wretched instrument [of] peculiar watery melancholy.&nbsp;... The devil himself could not make a basset horn sparkle".{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 1) 1981|pp=30–31}}|group=n}} In May 1890 he moved back to ''The World'', where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In the 2016 version of the ''[[Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians]]'', Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability."{{sfn|Anderson: ''Grove Music Online''}} Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950.{{sfn|Shaw and Laurence (Vol 3) 1981|p=767}}

From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for ''[[Saturday Review (London)|The Saturday Review]]'', edited by his friend [[Frank Harris]]. As at ''The World'', he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the [[Nineteenth-century theatre#Theatre in Britain|Victorian theatre]] and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".{{sfn|Weintraub|2013}}