Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under William Pember Reeves
Family and Intimate relationships
Amber Reeves
AR
's time at the London School of Economics was ended when she became pregnant as a result of a sexual liaison with H. G. Wells
, which had begun while she was at Cambridge...
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
Fictionalization
Amber Reeves
After the appearance of her first three novels, two critics gave AR
a significant place in accounts of the current state of fiction. R. Brimley Johnson
characterised her as a sex-explorer, free from either...
Friends, Associates
Dora Russell
Sylvia Pankhurst
enrolled her son as a day-boy at Beacon Hill, and lived nearby while writing The Suffragette Movement; Beatrice
and Sidney Webb
, and G. B. Shaw
also visited. The school hosted annual...
It was with regard to women's rights that MAW
's increasing conservatism was most clearly marked: although she was a leading figure in the cause for advancing women's education, by the late 1880s she was...
Literary responses
Mary Augusta Ward
Beatrice Webb
called this novel the most useful bit of work that has been done for many a long day. You have managed to give the arguments for and against factory legislation and a fixed...
Textual Features
Mary Augusta Ward
Her signatories—who mostly owed their eminence to their position as the the wives of prominent men—included Mrs Leslie Stephen
, Mrs Matthew Arnold
, Mrs Kegan Paul
(who was a novelist in her own right),...
politics
Harriet Shaw Weaver
She was elected to the Marylebone Labour Party committee in 1936. In a programme of self-education about labour and capitalism, she read Marx
's Das Kapital, Sidney
and Beatrice Webb
's Soviet Communism: A...
Textual Production
H. G. Wells
HGW
's The New Machiavelli was a political roman à clef which includes unfriendly comic sketches of many public figures on the left, including Beatrice
and Sidney Webb
.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(29 March 1911): 11
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
On 10 May Germany had invaded Holland and Belgium. In the event of an invasion of England, they could indeed expect a terrible personal fate, on account of their anti-war politics, Leonard's anti-war career and...
Occupation
Virginia Woolf
The Woolfs were planning to acquire a printing press as early as 22 February 1915, when Virginia wrote to Margaret Llewelyn Davies
about their excitement over the prospect: there's a chance of damaging the Webb
