Beatrice Webb

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Standard Name: Webb, Beatrice
Birth Name: Beatrice Potter
Married Name: Beatrice Webb
Indexed Name: Mrs Sidney Webb
Titled: Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield
An important and forceful left-wing intellectual (a shaper both of the Fabian Society and of the Labour Party ), BW wrote at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. Her subjects were social issues: for instance, unemployment, and the development of the co-operative movement and of trade unions. She was also (and from the same public-spirited motives) remarkable as a diarist and autobiographer. Almost all her writing on public topics (nearly forty publications, including eighteen monographs) was done in collaboration with her husband, Sidney Webb . So thoroughly are they thought of as one mind that joint biographies of them are more common than individual ones.
Black and white photograph of Beatrice Webb, seated with one arm resting on the arm of her chair. She is wearing a dark jacket with a light collar, and a polka-dotted tie. Her white hair is pulled back.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Health Margaret Harkness
From an early age, MH suffered from depression, what her cousin Beatrice Potter (later Beatrice Webb ) described as a state of morbid sensibility and fermentation which gave an almost permanent twist to her nature...
Education Margaret Harkness
MH was educated at home throughout her childhood. When she was twenty-one, she was sent to board at a fashionable girls' school
Nord, Deborah Epstein. The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb. University of Massachusetts Press.
40
, Stirling House in Bournemouth, to be finished. Here she...
Occupation Margaret Harkness
Her friend and cousin Beatrice Webb called MH 's early life as a journalist real intellectual drudgery
Goode, John. “Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel”. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, edited by H. Gustav Klaus, Harvester Press, pp. 45-66.
49
, and critic John Goode observes that her life in the early 1880s seems to have been...
Friends, Associates Margaret Harkness
Probably through sisters Kate Potter Courtney (whose house Harkness often stayed at) and Beatrice Potter (later Webb) , MH began to associate with the intellectuals who frequented the Reading Room of the British Museum ...
Family and Intimate relationships Margaret Harkness
An undated letter to Beatrice Webb further suggests that MH had an affair with an unknown married man.
Bellamy, Joyce M., and John Saville, editors. Dictionary of Labour Biography. Macmillan.
viii: 110
Travel Margaret Harkness
MH and her cousin Beatrice Potter (later Beatrice Webb ) travelled together to Austria.
Goode, John. “Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel”. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition, edited by H. Gustav Klaus, Harvester Press, pp. 45-66.
48
Bellamy, Joyce M., and John Saville, editors. Dictionary of Labour Biography. Macmillan.
viii: 105
Friends, Associates Margaret Harkness
MH quarrelled with her second cousin Beatrice Potter (later Beatrice Webb ), who up to now had been her close friend; their relationship never fully recovered.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Mitchell, Sally, editor. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Garland Press.
Textual Production May Kendall
MK 's relationship with Rowntree is described by Diana Maltz as what Beatrice Potter Webb had been to Charles Booth twenty-five years earlier.
Maltz, Diana. “Sympathy, Humor, and the Abject Poor in the Work of May Kendall”. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol.
50
, No. 3, ELT Press, pp. 313-32.
313
Her work suggests that although she was an advocate for social...
Friends, Associates Amy Levy
They included Olive Schreiner , the future Beatrice Webb , Dollie Maitland Radford , Margaret Harkness , Clementina Black (whose sister Constance had been a school friend of AL ), and Eleanor Marx . Through...
politics Marie Belloc Lowndes
The letter challenged a recent antisuffragist manifesto, and stressed three points from Prime Minister Asquith 's statement to suffragists of 14 August. The points were that women had rendered as effective service to their country...
Family and Intimate relationships Constance Lytton
Constance Lytton's elder sister, Elizabeth Edith (later Countess of Balfour) , became a novelist and a good friend of Beatrice Webb .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Elizabeth Edith Balfour
As Betty Balfour she published a popular account of...
Textual Features Ann Oakley
This book covers a great deal of ground. When it turns back from Modern Problems to A Brief History of Methodology its exemplars include Margaret Cavendish (who also provides one of three opening epigraphs), the...
Literary responses Sylvia Pankhurst
Save the Mothers was well reviewed. George Bernard Shaw responded enthusiastically to the book, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence expressed her pleasure at its positive reception. Vera Brittain also praised it, favourably comparing SP 's activism for...
Family and Intimate relationships Bessie Rayner Parkes
According to her daughter, BRP received a proposal of marriage from the much older Richard Potter (who was a business friend of her father's, and himself the father of the future Beatrice Webb ) after...
Friends, Associates Amber Reeves
Beatrice Webb resolved that she and her husband would stand by Amber (if she would let them) and drop H. G. Wells. A close friend of AR 's some years after the war was Sir Matthew Nathan

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