Annette Jeanie Beveridge, known as Jeannette, spent 49 of her 78 years married to the socialist historian Richard Henry Tawney. It's this marital persona that is remembered in the history and biography of the period; indeed, as the Labour MP Lena Jeger observed, Jeannette suffered from being taken as either Tawney's wife or William Beveridge's sister, or both. One historian even confuses the two, making her Tawney's sister and Beveridge's wife. Such a mistake is perhaps to be expected in an oeuvre that pays so little attention to women's individual identity and agency.

Of the four women in this book, Jeannette Tawney is the one with whom I have had the closest personal connection. Although she died when I was 14, and I don't remember meeting her, her husband was a regular visitor to my childhood home. He and my father, Richard Titmuss, belonged to the same tradition of ethical socialism, and they shared the same post-mortem insignia of being seen as ‘saints’ who contributed much to Labour Party policy. Harry Tawney, as he was known, was old when I knew him, and immensely shabby – a more or less permanent characteristic, for which his wife never forgave him – and surrounded by a cloud of coltsfoot tobacco, another cause of marital disharmony. On the occasion of Tawney's 80th birthday, my father was enlisted to help write a celebratory pamphlet: ‘We have said nothing about his wife. I do not think we should,’ he noted in the correspondence with the editor. Richard Titmuss transmitted his dismissive opinion of Jeannette Tawney to the more uniformly negative of the two existing full-length R.H. Tawney biographies: Ross Terrill's R.H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (1974). Titmuss gave Terrill information about the Tawneys, and he read the manuscript of the biography and enthusiastically promoted its publication. He also sent some of the chapters with a strong recommendation to José Harris, William Beveridge's biographer, who repeats Terrill's negative evaluation of Jeannette in her own text. These surreptitious pathways by which one person's evaluation colours others can have a major influence.

My mother, Kay Titmuss, was also dismissive about Jeannette as a poor housekeeper and a general hindrance to Tawney. These opinions echoed what I discovered, when doing the research for this book, to be the dominant characterisation of Jeannette Tawney in the biography and hagiography describing her husband's life and works.