The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, and: Daisy Princess of Pless, (1873-1943): A Discovery, and: Vera Brittain: A Life (review)

In her brief but illuminating preface to Beatrice Webb's diaries, Hermione Lee likens the excitement of a novel to "the struggle they reveal in this beautiful, driven, clever, egocentric, powerfully assertive and high-minded woman" (viii). The description might equally apply to the subjects of the other books under review. Though their social circumstances were disparate, and they represent different generations, their letters and diaries express comparable battles to discover a fulfilling vocation in life and to reconcile the traditional female role within marriage with personal desires and ambitions. These ambitions were not modest. Each sought not merely to engage in practical work to relieve human suffering, but also to bring about political and social change through writing, speeches, or personal influence.

Collectively, their experience spans the Victorian age, its complex transition to modernity, and encroaches upon our own. Beatrice began her diary at the age of fifteen in 1873, the year Daisy Cornwallis-West was born. They died within two months of each other at the height of World War II in 1943. Daisy, who became Princess Henry of Pless on her marriage in December 1891, just two years before Vera Brittain's birth, began her diary in 1894. Vera died in 1970, within the lifetime of many readers of this review. Whilst none of these remarkable women came from impoverished classes, their life writing discloses some of the subtleties and fluctuations of the English class structure. All, though well traveled and international in outlook, retained a quintessential English identity.

At points their lives overlapped, or mirrored each other. If Beatrice's salon in Edwardian London, to quote the Mackenzies, "deservedly earned a reputation for political intrigue" in pursuit of Webbian policies (xv), then Daisy capitalized on extensive royal and diplomatic connections, and her skill as hostess, to try to prevent World War I. Thus, both knew Winston Churchill, the one through common interests in social reform, the other initially when her brother married Winston's mother and later when enlisting Churchill's eloquence in attempts to influence the Kaiser.

When World War I began, while Beatrice was busy with her books, government, and Labour Party committee work, Daisy and Vera served as auxiliary nurses. The Princess of Pless, vilified in the German press as a spy, served with the Red Cross on hospital trains. Vera enlisted as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment), and for a period, was posted to a ward for wounded German POWs at a military hospital in France. Years later, famous in the wake of Testament of Youth, the powerful memoir of her war experience, she prized her invitation to Passfield Corner to visit Mrs. Sidney Webb.

For both, the war transformed their lives in ways neither could have anticipated. Vera's conversion to the pacifist cause was a direct result of her World War I experience. To Daisy it brought the political change that swept away her family's wealth and status, and effectively ended her life on the public stage.

The painful individual tussles emerging from the personal writings of these exceptional women at once give color and life to the generalizations of social historians on topics such as women's education, attitudes to marriage, or women's war effort while reminding us how problematic such generalizations must inevitably be. In particular, for students of Women's Studies it is in the paradoxes and complexities of their feminist positions that the interest lays.

The four volumes of the Beatrice Webb diaries edited by the Mackenzies—from which this present volume has been produced—were substantially [End...