Beatrice Webb: A Life

By Carole Seymour-Jones

"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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566630010
• ISBN13: 9781566630016
• Release Date: August 1992
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 383 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.4" x 9.5"