Rachel Holmes in The Independent:
When I set out to write the life of Eleanor Marx in 2006 some friends worried that yet again I’d been seduced by an unfashionable and overly abstruse biographical subject. Either that, or they just said: “Who?” A Marx? The mother of socialist feminism? It didn’t sound catchy in our new century. Yet Eleanor Marx is one of British history’s great heroes. Born in 1855 in a Soho garret to hard up German immigrant exiles, her arrival was initially a disappointment to her father. He wanted a boy. By her first birthday Eleanor had become his favourite. She was nicknamed Tussy, to rhyme, her parents said, with “pussy” not “fussy”. Cats she adored; fussy she wasn’t. She loved Shakespeare, Ibsen, both the Shelleys, good poetry, bad puns and champagne. She would be delighted to know that we can claim her as the first self-avowed champagne socialist. Yet during the journey of writing the life of Eleanor Marx I discovered that I was writing about an increasingly topical subject. Friends sent me articles about the resurgence in the reading of the primary work of Marx and Engels amongst the under-50s, particularly in countries where there are currently new movements for social democracy. Then, Harvard University Press published the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century on the subject of economic inequality. Since its release last month, Piketty’s Capital has sold nearly 80,000 copies. This would much amuse Eleanor Marx, who knew how disappointed her father was when the first volume of his Capital was published in 1867 to resounding silence and negligible sales. She spent a large part of her life editing and translating this and subsequent volumes of the work whose distribution outran that of the Bible and Shakespeare in the 20th century.
What started for Karl Marx as a 30- to 50-page essay, developed into a life’s work that his youngest daughter inherited. She sat on her father’s knee, played around him and learned to write and draw by his side at the kitchen table, where he worked in the early years of the project. Tussy and Capital grew up together. Marx said: “Tussy is me.” Her life and character form an epic story of adventure, morality, dilemma, contradiction and tragedy. Her thoughts and actions embody Britain’s history of struggle to achieve social democracy and equality.
More here.
