Eleanor Marx

A Life

Rachel Holmes, Bloomsbury Publishing, 528 pages, hardback, £25

The daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx, Eleanor Marx was the first woman to lead the British dock workers’ and gas workers’ trade unions. For years she worked tirelessly for her father as his personal secretary and researcher.

Later, she went on to edit many of his key political works.

She went from meeting to meeting, giving speeches until she almost lost her voice. She wrote political essays and articles and was a great intellectual force in her own right. But her life was cut tragically short. Despite the turbulence of her personal life, she never wavered in her political commitment and her commitment to socialism.

Foremost among her achievements was her pioneering feminism. For Eleanor Marx, 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. She was close friends with Olive Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw, Will Thorne and William Morris.

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, and who was unafraid to live her contradictions.

Reviews contributed by the Bookmarks socialist bookshop. Order online at www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk