gbs’s inspiration from garinish

It is said that George Bernard Shaw wrote parts of his play St Joan on Garinish. In the OPW brochure you can find a photograph of him posing between Homer and the young Nero. He was probably inspired by the Bryce’s daughter Marjorie, who led a procession on horseback dressed as Joan of Arc at the Women’s Coronation Procession in London in the year 1911. She led some fourty thousand women from almost thirty suffrage organisations whose members celebrated Joan as a perfect symbol to lead women in their appeal for formal admission into the councils of the nation. Her father Annan Bryce though and her uncle Sir James Bryce, the one time Ambassador in Washington, were strictly against suffrage.