She was, George Bernard Shaw wrote, a great citizen, a great civilizer, and a great investigator. For many she represented the triumph of the independent Englishwoman, for others little more than a heroic failure. But whatever responses Beatrice Webb provoked in her unusual life, she could scarcely be ignored. In this fine and sensitive new biography, Carole Seymour-Jones uncovers the brilliant and beautiful woman who renounced social position to fight for workers and slum dwellers in late-nineteenth-century London; who chose socialism over love and motherhood when she married Sidney Webb; who with Shaw was a founder of Fabian social reform; and who with her husband applauded Soviet communism in its early years. Beatrice’s story is a very modern one, the author writes, because it is a story of choices…. She reworked the Victorian feminine ideal of the “angel in the house’ to follow her own original path as a social investigator…[and] she paid a heavy price. Ms. Seymour-Jones has written an intriguing biography with important reverberations for women in our own time. With 8 pages of photographs.