Jose Harris, who was "the author of a magnificent biography of William Beveridge that established her as the pre-eminent historian of the British welfare state," died September 13, the Guardian reported. She was 82. In William Beveridge, published in 1977, just 14 years after its subject's death, "she blew apart cherished narratives about the architect of the welfare state."
A second edition 20 years later offered an account of Beveridge's unusual private life, something that Harris had been prevented by his stepchildren from exploring fully in the first edition.
The tension between private life and public service also shaped her book Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870-1914 (1993), in which she offered a picture of British society in a period of fundamental transformation. The work secured her election as a fellow of the British Academy.
In 1962, after graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, Harris undertook a Ph.D. on unemployment as a problem in social policy in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, supervised by Richard Titmuss of the London School of Economics. After teaching at University College London (1964-66), she moved to a research fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford (1966-69). Her interest in Beveridge, which had been central to her Ph.D., was nurtured by the then warden of Nuffield, Norman Chester, whose early career had included service as secretary to the Beveridge committee.
She then taught for almost a decade in Titmuss's department of social administration at the London School of Economics. While there she published her first book, Unemployment and Politics (1972), and the biography of Beveridge.
When Harris's husband, James Harris, was elected to an Oxford fellowship in 1973, they moved "to the leafy north of the city," the Guardian wrote, noting that she "exchanged gardening tips with an elderly neighbor, Lady O'Malley (the novelist Ann Bridge). Only some time after her neighbor's death did Jose discover that she was the Mary Sanders who had turned down a proposal of marriage from Beveridge 60 years before. The correspondence between Beveridge and Sanders was one of the new archival finds that enabled Jose to produce the enriched second edition of the biography."