Beatrice Webb: A Life - Hardcover

"She was," George Bernard Shaw wrote, "a great citizen, a great civilizer, and a great investigator." For many she represented the triumph of the independent Englishwoman, for others little more than a heroic failure. But whatever responses Beatrice Webb provoked in her unusual life, she could scarcely be ignored. In this fine and sensitive new biography, Carole Seymour-Jones uncovers the brilliant and beautiful woman who renounced social position to fight for workers and slum dwellers in late-nineteenth-century London; who chose socialism over love and motherhood when she married Sidney Webb; who with Shaw was a founder of Fabian social reform; and who with her husband applauded Soviet communism in its early years. "Beatrice's story is a very modern one," the author writes, because "it is a story of choices...She reworked the Victorian feminine ideal of the 'angel in the house' to follow her own original path as a social investigator...[and] she paid a heavy price." Ms. Seymour-Jones has written an intriguing biography with important reverberations for women in our own time. With 8 pages of photographs.

She remains an inexhaustibly fascinating person, partly because of her energy and commitment and partly because her views seem to the modern mind mutually contradictory. The London Times Perceptive and sympathetic. Times Literary Supplement Remarkably good and interesting. London Observer