Shaw’s major play about the war, however, wasHeartbreak House(1919d) which he wrote from 1916–1917 with unusual difficulty for aman accustomed to writing plays “d’un seul trait” (letter to Mrs. PatrickCampbell, May 14, 1916, in Dent, 1952, p. 209). As was Shaw’s practice,he wrote the preface last (in 1919), in this case waiting until the war wasover. The play and the preface are stinging indictments of the Europeanleisure classes before the war, including the class of the Fabian leadershipto which he had belonged. The play was actually conceived at a summercountry house that Shaw had shared with the Webbs and Leonard andVirginia Woolf during the war (Shaw in Laurence, 1988).Heartbreak House(1919d) is an allegorical comedy of manners witha surprise ending. Characters, representing different aspects of society,find themselves together in a country house, playing the cat-and-mousematch-making games of the genre, with Shaw’s usual cutting socialcommentary. Without warning to those onstage or in the audience, thezeppelins come at the end of the play. The zeppelins exhilarate all of thepeople in the house, except two. Those two run for safety and are killedby the bombs. The others in the house remain transfixed and thrilled.“Sh-sh! Listen: do you hear it now? It’s magnificent” (1919d, p. 120),says the mistress of the house, Mrs. Hushabye, about the sound of thezeppelins. Her husband turns on all of the lights in the house so that thezeppelins can see it, and says, “We of this house are only moths flying intothe candle” (1919d, p. 120). When the zeppelins have left:, Mrs. Hushabyeremarks, “But what a glorious experience. I hope they’ll come againtomorrow night” (1919d, p. 122).In this ending, leisure led to catastrophe: the characters’ fate wassealed without them even knowing it was in the balance. Then, like “mothsflying into the candle,” they embraced their own potential destruction.According to Robert Corrigan (1959), “It is inHeartbreak Housethat Shawfirst came to grips without equivocation with those questions that hauntedIbsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov before him. How is one to live in anirrational world?” (p. 2).