Beatrice Webb: A Life - Hardcover

Seymour-Jones, Carole

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566630010 ISBN 13: 9781566630016

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 1992

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author:

Carole Seymour-Jones studied history at Oxford and was first drawn to Beatrice Webb through her diaries and letters, many of which appear for the first time in this book. Ms. Seymour-Jones lives and writes in England.

From Publishers Weekly:

In her evangelical crusade for a more just society, Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) suppressed the emotional and feminine elements in her personality, as this exemplary biography reveals. A railway magnate's daugther, she renounced her sexual passion for charismatic, male-chauvinist politician Joseph Chamberlain, the great love of her life. In an act of class rebellion, she married a Cockney hairdresser's son, Sidney Webb, whom she found physically repulsive. With deep remorse, she forsook motherhood for the sake of their literary and political partnership which, according to English writer Seymour-Jones, exacted a heavy price--mental breakdown, anorexia nervosa and a hardening of her personality into a didactic, puritanical mold. The woman who laid the groundwork for the modern welfare state emerges here as a deeply conflicted person who kept a tight rein on the mystical, artistic and sexual impulses that simmered beneath her brittle facade. This demythologizing life story rescues Beatrice Webb from her husband's shadows and reverberates with implications for contemporary women. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1566630010
• ISBN 13: 9781566630016
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 383