The Diary of Beatrice Webb Volume One 1873-1892 Glitter Around and Darkness Within by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie

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Beatrice Webb was one of the greatest British women of the past century. Notable both as a social researcher and reformer, she was one of the most influential of modern Socialists, and with her husband Sidney Webb was at the centre of British intellectual and political life for nearly seventy years.

Beatrice Webb kept a diary from the ago of fifteen until her death at the age of eighty-five: it is a remarkable record of her times. Reflective, yet rich in insights, judgements and anecdotes about the people and problems of late Victorian and modern Britain, in manuscript in the Diary has long been used as an important source by historians.

Volume I, Glitter Around and Darkness Within begins a set of four volumes which together will constitute the first comprehensive and systematic selection from this brilliant work and it demonstrates that Beatrice Webb was one of the world's great diarists. Her Diary is shown to be not only a valuable source of reference but also a frank and intensely personal testament of great literary merit, in which Beatrice Webb movingly reveals the private face behind her formidable public appearance. It is, in her own words, the record of an apprenticeship, a partnership and a pilgrimage, of a strong natured woman's search for a career and a creed.

In Glitter Around and Darkness Within, Beatrice Webb tells of her girlhood as one of nine sisters, of her relationship to her mother and her father and her friendship with Herbert Spencer, who knew her well and did so much to encourage her. It tells too of her painful adolescence and her attempts to find a meaning for her life, vividly describing her work as a young woman in the East End of London. Most revealing of all is her account of her obsessive and self-thwarted passion for Joseph Chamberlain, the leading Radical politician of the day, and of the troubled courtship which led to her marriage to Sidney Webb and the beginning of that famous partnership