Unrestrained by convention, lion-hearted and free, Eleanor Marx
(1855-98) was an exceptional woman. Hers was the first English
translation of Flaubert's Mme Bovary. She pioneered the theatre of
Henrik Ibsen.
She was the first woman to lead the British dock
workers' and gas workers' trades 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, sexual equality was a necessary
precondition for a just society. 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 favourite 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 epicentre 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 organising until her untimely end,
which - with its letters, legacies, secrets and hidden paternity - reads
in part like a novel by Wilkie Collins, and in part like the modern
tragedy it was.
Rachel Holmes has gone back to original
sources to tell the story of the woman who did more than any other to
transform British politics in the nineteenth century, who was unafraid
to live her contradictions.
Eleanor Marx : A Life - Rachel Holmes
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£12.99