A Biography of Beatrice Webb

BOOK REVIEWS much her fiction reveals about the perceptual basis of human experience and the "multiplicity of self and life." While psychoanalysts who misdiagnose manic-depressives by Freudian models do not improve their patients' symptoms, biologically-trained analysts can successfully teach their patients how to identify the onset of the syndrome, modify circumstances, and improve their symptoms. With a manic-depressive author such as Woolf, literary critics have similar options. They may impose an irrelevant Freudian model or recognize in Woolf s life and art the manifestations of the syndrome and write about the meaning of what is there rather than of what is not. With Woolf, the need to create one's own meaning as counter to a meaningless world was not just a modernist theory; it was the basis of her psychic survival. Present in Woolf s fiction is a postmodern awareness of how "reality" is consciousness-implemented and necessarily inclusive of oscillations, inconsistencies, complexities that defy pat theorizing. Without specific knowledge of the brain, but with an acute awareness of the effects of its splintering, Woolf pioneered her own research. She bravely, deliberately, projected her own mood swings onto her characters until she became her own diagnostician. Through her fiction she learned to understand her own bipolarity and "enclose the whole." Her fiction, as Caramagno points out, so challenges the reader and critic. Panthea Reid Broughton ______________ Louisiana State University A Biography of Beatrice Webb Carolyn Seymour-Jones. Beatrice Webb: A Life. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. xii+ 369 pp. $30.00 BEATRICE WEBB is widely regarded as an ideal, independent, intellectual woman, yet there are those who lament that she was at best a heroic failure. Whatever judgments are rendered about her life and accomplishments—and this latest biography offers quite a few provocative ones—she can hardly be ignored. Antipodal evaluations about her are a consequence of a life shrouded in complex truths and tainted to a degree by her multiple personalities. Admired by many and envied by some, few knew of her inner turmoil. To view her as little more than a puritanical socialist eager to embrace any Utopian scheme that came her way is unwarranted. 501 ELT 36:4 1993 "She was," Shaw wrote, "a great citizen, a great civilizer, and a great investigator." Wells, on the other hand, carped that she possessed "a bony soul," that at "her base ... was vanity gaunt and greedy." Echoing Wells, equally captious critics have piled on such pejoratives as "metallic ," "depressive," "tortured," "humourless," "censorious." The record is less than kind. Born in 1858 into a wealthy and privileged family, Beatrice Potter was apparently a lonely child. During her formative years she met and was influenced by such famous family friends as Francis Galton, John Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. She grew into an intelligent , passionate, and emotional woman who, according to her own words, longed for marriage and motherhood. Why she gave up the one man she loved, Joseph Chamberlain, and chose socialism over love is melodrama at best. After rejecting Chamberlain, the dazzling leader of the Radical wing of the British Liberal Party, her life became filled with days of repression, renunciation, and sacrifice. Burdened with selfdoubt , she lived in an existential vacuum. Eventually, in what some interpret an act of social rebellion, she married Sidney Webb, a physically unattractive individual who because of family circumstances was forced to drop out of school at sixteen. Very much in his favor, Webb was an autodidact and even pushed himself to complete evening classes at London University. His looks, his background, his lack of income, he realized, were all against him. Soon after Beatrice met him, she complained in her diary of "his tadpole body, unhealthy skin, lack of manners, Cockney pronunciation." He struck her as "a London retail tradesman with the aims of a Napoleon, a queer monstrosity to be justified only by success." Despite such animadversions , she could not but help being impressed with his sensitivity and acuteness. Sidney Webb was a prime mover in a socialist circle Beatrice had become affiliated with early in the 1890s: "one... in which I may sooner or later throw in my hat for good and all...