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.
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...
politics
Katharine Bruce Glasier
After their marriage, KBG
and her husband, John Bruce Glasier
, formed an effective socialist partnership very much like that of Sidney
and Beatrice Webb
. They maintained their involvement in the Independent Labour Party
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...
politics
Mary Augusta Ward
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...
politics
Annie Besant
Sidney
and Beatrice Webb
later acknowledged the importance of AB
's efforts to the new Unionism that became widespread after this year.
Taylor, Anne, 1932 -. Annie Besant: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1992.
212
politics
Clementina Black
In London she met Fabian and Marxist socialists. She was a good friend of Eleanor Marx
for some time, though their friendship later waned.
Garnett, Richard. Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life. Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991.
40
One source notes that CB
's affinity with Fabianism
likely...
Aberdeen, Ishbel Maria Gordon, Marchioness of, editor. Women in Industrial Life: The International Congress of Women of 1899. T. Fisher Unwin, 1900.
front matter
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...
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),...
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
Her work suggests that although she was an advocate for social...
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.
Textual Production
Mary Agnes Hamilton
MAH
issued another political biography, entitled Sidney
and Beatrice Webb
: A Study in Contemporary Biography, undertaken because she felt that the Webbs were not sufficiently valued by the current generation.
Shadwell, Arthur. “Mr & Mrs Webb”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1655, 19 Oct. 1933, p. 702.
702
Textual Production
Mary Agnes Hamilton
In 1935, when she gathered a small group of Labour friends to discuss her project, she found that they gravitated inevitably to the topic of Henderson's relations with Ramsay MacDonald
. Two years later she...
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, 1982, pp. 45-66.
48
Bellamy, Joyce M., and John Saville, editors. Dictionary of Labour Biography. Macmillan, 1972–2024.
