Beatrice Webb
-
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.
Connections
Connections | Author name Sort descending | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
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, 1990. Mitchell, Sally, editor. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Garland Press, 1988. |
Family and Intimate relationships | Margaret Harkness | MH
's mother, Elizabeth Seddon Bolton Toswill Harkness
, had been married and widowed before. She was the daughter of William Seddon
, a Leicestershire lace-maker. Through her, Margaret was related to the Potter family... |
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, 1985. 40 |
Occupation | Margaret Harkness | Her friend and cousin Beatrice Webb
called MH
's early life as a journalist real intellectual drudgery qtd. in 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, 1982, pp. 45-66. 49 |
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, 1972–2025. viii: 110 |
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, 2007, pp. 313-32. 313 |
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 |
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... |
Cultural formation | Amber Reeves | Born a New Zealander, she clearly regarded herself later in life as English. Her parents were highly educated professionals. Her mother was a suffragist, and both parents became members of the Fabian Society
(founded three... |
Timeline
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Texts
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