10 Best Mothers

Esquire again. Guess I should subscribe. But I was gonna take Vanity Fair! Oh, well.

9. Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw

As any college student will tell you, sometimes the nicest thing parents can do is provide financial support until their child discovers what he or she wants to do. Of course, this is taken to an extreme when the child in question, like George Bernard Shaw, doesn’t know what he wants to do until he’s almost 40. Born in 1856, Shaw didn’t support himself as a writer until he began working as a theater critic in 1895 (and didn’t have his first real literary success until he was 41, with the play The Devil’s Disciple). Since Dad was an alcoholic with an inoperable squint -- society did not look kindly upon squinters in this era -- there was only one person to turn to: Mom. Her allowance/free housing kept him going until he established himself as one of the major writers of the twentieth century, winning a Nobel Prize for Literature (and an Oscar for the My Fair Lady-inspiring Pygmalion). He repaid her by tirelessly defending women’s rights. (Luckily, she was dead before she could witness his less-rousing senile final years, when he championed Joseph Stalin.)