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.
Her involvement in socialist circles led her to acquaintance with Sidney
and Beatrice Webb
, Edward Hulton
(editor of the Sunday Chronicle), and Robert Blatchford
, for whom she wrote several articles.
Thompson, Laurence. The Enthusiasts. Victor Gollancz Limited, 1971.
71
With...
Friends, Associates
Mary Agnes Hamilton
MAH
knew and worked closely with the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald
, though her early intense admiration for him diminished with time. Up to the year after publishing her book on him (which was also...
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.
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...
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...
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...
Literary responses
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Robin Hone
, reviewing, found a genial mist of restrained and charitable recollection, which ignored such jarring contrasts as that between this time and the First World War which was to follow, or between D. H. Lawrence
Occupation
Ann Bridge
Since, however, writing seemed unlikely to yield her a livelihood, she went immediately to work as assistant secretary for the Charity Organization Society
, Chelsea branch. This paid her twenty-three shillings a week, with hours...
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
, and critic John Goode
observes that her life in the early 1880s seems to have been...
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
