THE DIARIES OF BEATRICE WEBB

The Webb diaries, which begin in 1873 when Webb was 15, and end early in wartime 1943, were edited by the MacKenzies and published almost in their entirety in four volumes between 1982 and 1985. This new abridgment includes enough material to reflect the two significant ways in which the Fabian reformer confided in her diaries. The first was to commune with what she called her "Other Self," which "sits again in the judgement seat and listens to the tale of the hours, days, acts, thoughts and feelings" of the writer. The second was to describe her loyal and entirely adoring relationship to the bespectacled and rumpled Cockney social scientist and politician, Sidney Webb, whom she—a beautiful and assertive woman—married at 34. They were, she conceded, "curiously combined—I am the investigator and he the executor." As they moved in political, social and cultural circles beyond their Leftist bent, she recorded—wittily and often cattily—the successes as well as the scandals involving acquaintances from prime ministers to party-givers. By the later 1920s the couple, now aging and ailing, were anxiously witnessing the rise of dictatorships and the decline of their socialist ideal, as well as the deterioration of friends and colleagues, all tirelessly set down in 57 exercise books. Sidney would be silenced by a stroke in 1938, but would survive Beatrice, whose last lines were penned five days before her death. Her diaries fully substantiate her description of her husband and herself late in life as "happy ghosts, loving each other and always with a job in hand, like two aged craftsmen." Illus. not seen by PW. (June)