Beatrice Webb: A Life

Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1992. xii, 369 pages, illustrations; 24 cm. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Age toning. Stated First American Edition. Dust jacket lightly soiled, with a creased back flap. "'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. / 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." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. 8vo.