Fabian Socialist, social researcher and reformer, co-founder of the London School of Economics, Beatrice Webb was at the centre of British intellectual and political life for nearly seventy years. She was also one of the greatest diarists of her time.
From 1873, aged fifteen, until her death in 1943 at the age of eighty-five, Beatrice Webb confided in her diary. Here she describes her obsessive and self-thwarted passion for politician Joseph Chamberlain, her work as a young woman in London's East End, and the troubled courtship that led to her marriage and famous partnership with Sidney Webb.
She tells of the people they knew: Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and their good friends Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.
Recording the collapse of Liberalism, the rise of the Labour movement and the devastation of two world wars, 'The Diaries' also chart the advent of the modern world: woman's suffrage, changing moral attitudes, the advent of the wireless and new literature.
