In this comprehensive and penetrating study of Heartbreak House, A. M. Gibbs shows how George Bernard Shaw's complex, Janus-faced play connects unscrupulous behavior in England's social, political, and economic spheres and the life of "cultured, leisured Europe" to the catastrophe of World War I. Revealing the play to be more intricately autobiographical than has been previously recognized, Gibbs analyzes the ways in which refracted images of Shaw's own experience in the realms of love and sex appear in the play's amatory themes.