The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb

Biographers of Beatrice Webb and historians of Fabianism have neglected certain aspects of Webb's early life and work which, if taken into account, would contribute to a reassessment of her historical and literary importance. Her autobiography, My Apprenticeship, written after World War I, and the diary she kept for some seventy years reveal a Beatrice Webb that bears little resemblance to the calculating and confident super-rationationlist of caricature and legend. Out of these texts emerg...