Synopses & Reviews
Unrestrained by convention, lionhearted and free, Eleanor Marx (1855-98) was an exceptional woman. Hers was the first English translation of Flauberts
Madame Bovary. She pioneered the theater of Henrik Ibsen. She was the first woman to lead the British dock workers and gas workers trade unions. For years she worked tirelessly for her father, Karl Marx, as personal secretary and researcher. Later, she edited many of his key political works and laid the foundations for his biography. But foremost among her achievements was her pioneering feminism. For her, gender equality was a necessary precondition for a just society, and she crusaded for this in Britain and on a celebrated tour across America in 1886.
Drawing strength from her family and their wide circle, including Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht, Eleanor Marx set out into the world to make a difference. Her favorite motto: “Go ahead!” With her closest friends—among them Olive Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw, Will Thorne, and William Morris—she was at the epicenter of British socialism. She was also the only Marx to claim her Jewishness. But her life contained a deep sadness: She loved a faithless and dishonest man, the academic, actor, and would-be playwright Edward Aveling. Yet despite the unhappiness he brought her, Eleanor Marx never wavered in her political life, ceaselessly campaigning and organizing until her untimely end.
Rachel Holmes has written a dazzling and original portrait of one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century.
Review
"Eleanor Marx is both a challenging and a stimulating subject for a biographer. In this widely researched and passionately written book, Rachel Holmes has found an original way of presenting her. She balances Eleanor's political career, centred in the Reading Room of the British Museum among her Victorian Bloomsbury group colleagues, with her sobriquet, the emotional figure of 'Tussy', whose love for Edward Aveling ends in tragedy. It is as if the biographer is conducting string and wind instruments in an orchestra. The result, surprising at first, becomes profoundly satisfying." —Michael Holroyd
"I got to the end of Rachel Holmess Eleanor Marx and wanted to start all over again. There is so much in it and yet it reads effortlessly. The scholarship that brings the second part of the nineteenth century alive is a feast, and at the center of it all, the irrepressible daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx. A giant whose character in all its complexity steps off the page to inspire another generation." —Susie Orbach, author of Bodies
About the Author
The vivid, “profoundly sataisfying” biography of the first modern feminist, who spent her entire life fighting for the principle of equality.