Marx’s daughter

Marx's daughter

Eleanor Marx at eighteen

Book Details

Rachel Holmes

ELEANOR MARX

A Life
528pp. Bloomsbury. £25.
978 0 7475 8384 4

A new biography restores the foremother of socialist feminism to history

ELAINE SHOWALTER

The great divas among the early feminist intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller and Eleanor Marx, lived valiantly and died young. Indeed, their operatic deaths seem like the punishments bestowed by a malign universe for defying female destiny – Wollstonecraft expiring slowly of puerperal fever and septicaemia at thirty-six, Fuller drowning in a shipwreck at forty as she returned to the United States with her Italian lover and their child. But Eleanor Marx's death seems the most ironic and inconsistent with her life, because it was not an accident, but a choice. At the age of forty-three, dressed ritually in white, she killed herself after discovering the perfidy of her partner Edward Aveling. As the child of Karl Marx, she had lived and breathed socialism, collectivism and sexual equality since childhood; she was the designated daughter of the revolution. So why did she end like Madame Bovary or Madame Butterfly?

That's the question all of her biographers must face. Chushichi Tsuzuki subtitles his Life of Eleanor Marx (1967) "A socialist tragedy", with Aveling as the villain. In her monumental two-volume study (1971, 1976), Yvonne Kapp blamed Eleanor's despair over the slow progress of the British labour movement; she "had thought to see the dawn of a new world. For her, the light receded and she would not stay". Rachel Holmes, however, does not see the suicide as a negation of the legacy. From the first pages of her exhilarating biography, she champions Eleanor Marx as a great hero of British history, "the foremother of socialist feminism", and a woman who "changed the world". Holmes exuberantly embraces the jumble of independence and obligation, self-assertion and self-starvation, as an essential condition of a life "as varied and full of contradictions as the materialist dialectic in which she was, quite literally, conceived".

Her glowing account of Eleanor Marx's childhood makes that conception sound very appealing. There were already six people in the messy, smoky two-room Soho flat where she was born on January 16, 1855: Karl, called Mohr (Moor), for his curly black hair and swarthy skin; Jenny, or Möhme; two older sisters, Laura and Jennychen; a baby brother, Edgar, who soon died; and Helen Demuth, or Lenchen, the "second mother", who was the housekeeper and nurse. Adding to this parental surplus was Marx's prosperous friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the "second father" who supported them all financially and helped educate the daughters. Eleanor was given her own pet name, "Tussy".

The Marxes were impoverished, and their rooms were dirty as well as shabby. But home was so cosy, noisy and busy, her two mothers so wise and loving, the stories of her two fathers so magical, her two sisters so bright and artistic, that Tussy never noticed the trips to the pawnshop or the broken furniture. She internalized the image of a perfect marriage, a large and happy family, a communal household. Most of all, there were piles of books, pamphlets, articles and journals. As their fortunes rose or fell, the Marxes might be "short of many things, but books and paper and pencils and ink and nibs and needles, brushes, glue, sewing thread and stubs of charcoal were in plentiful supply". Home-schooled by her father until the age of eleven, Tussy was introduced to atheism, socialism, science and literature (especially Shakespeare) by one of "the greatest minds in Europe", and encouraged to read and study whatever captured her imagination, from the novels of Dickens and Scott to the American Civil War.

Holmes makes it sound like a Marxist version of Little Women, with Tussy as Jo. Yet there were mysteries and warnings in the Marx household as well. In 1851, Lenchen had given birth to a son, Freddy, who was sent away as an infant to be fostered, and never came back to the family. His father was unnamed, but they all assumed it was Engels. Mohr was often away, sometimes for months, and money was always in short supply, or squandered when there were windfalls or inheritances. When Engels's mistress Mary Burns, a Manchester millhand, died, he quickly replaced her with her sister Lizzy.

Meanwhile Möhme, Lenchen, and Lizzy were stuck home with the needles and thread. As Möhme wrote to Lizzy, "in all these battles, we women have to bear the hardest, i.e. pettiest parts. In the battle with the world the man gets stronger . . . we sit at home and darn socks". Holmes vividly contrasts socialist women's domestic drudgery with men's freedom to create: "For every hundred meals they cooked, Marx and Engels expressed an idea; for every basket of petticoats, bibs, and curtains they sewed together, Marx and Engels wrote an article. For every pregnancy . . . Marx and Engels wrote a book".

Tussy did not want to play a petty or petticoat part on the stage of history. Determined to escape the domestic trap, she learned philosophy, chess and gymnastics instead of cooking and sewing, and became Marx's best student, the surrogate son. Throughout her childhood, Mohr was writing Das Kapital, and she grew up preparing to carry on his work. As Holmes sums up their connection, "Karl Marx was the theory, Eleanor Marx was the practice".

Yet as Tussy wrote to her sister Laura in 1892, "Is it not wonderful . . . how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach to others?" Holmes uses the line as an epigraph to her book, and the reader can view the gulf between theory and practice as both comic and tragic. Marx turned out to be Freddy's father, having got Lenchen pregnant when Jenny was pregnant too, denied his son and cast him out, and lied about it for the rest of his life. He hoped to spare his daughters early marriages to penniless revolutionaries like himself, but who else were they likely to meet? Laura and Jennychen were quickly burdened with babies and poverty. In the 1870s, Tussy, too, fell in love with Hippolyte Lissagary ("Lissa"), a glamorous survivor of the Paris Commune, exiled in London and twice her age. The relationship much improved her French, but Mohr did not approve, and at eighteen, she left home and moved to Brighton to support herself as a teacher by day, do research for Lissa's history of the Commune by night, and spend all her time with him when he came down at weekends.

The liaison with Lissa, by then her fiancé, was the trigger for her first bout of psychosomatic illness, an array of nervous symptoms including anorexia and fainting. By 1874 she had given in to her parents' pressure to come home; but as soon as she was well, she began again to smother her anxieties about her vocation and independence with frenetic activity. Her diary was packed with meetings of the English Text Society, Chaucer Society, New Shakespeare Society, Sunday Shakespeare Society, Browning Society, and Shelley Society. She was also helping her sisters care for their ailing babies, and as her father's secretary and research assistant, performed hours of "unpaid labour of love". In that line, she also took on the English translation of Lissa's book. At last, in March 1880, she ended her engagement, and Lissa returned to Paris. She was free.

Nevertheless, she had a more serious breakdown in 1881 triggered by the passionate desire to begin a new life in conflict with daughterly duty and self-doubt. She was treated by Dr Horatio Bryan Donkin, a progressive, even radical thinker, who understood the newly recognized epidemic of nervous disorders in relation to the social conditions of the young unmarried woman. "All kinds of . . . barriers to the free play of her power are set up by ordinary social and ethical customs", he wrote in his essay on hysteria for the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine; "'Thou shalt not' meets a girl at every turn". Donkin hypothesized that sexual repression, the strain of caring for ageing parents, and overwork were the causes of the daughter's disease; Freud's "Anna O" (Bertha Pappenheim) and Hardy's Sue Bridehead would catch it in the 1890s. As Holmes explains, Tussy was at an impasse. She wanted to

"Go ahead!" But in order to do this, she had to take unthinkable action and abandon her family. This was not in her nature. She wouldn't be free unless they abandoned her. And that was not in their nature.

Nonetheless, in the next few years most of her family – first Jennychen, then Möhme, and, in March 1883, her father – did leave her, by dying. She had persuaded Mohr to pay for dramatic training, but after his death she gave up her dreams of the stage, and looked for other ways to earn money. Holmes argues that the plays Tussy sought would not be written until the new theatre of Ibsen and Shaw, and that the complex female roles she longed for did not yet exist. Yet giving up acting was another loss, and deprived her of a creative outlet and a society of her own. Fortunately, Karl Hirsch, a journalist who admired her, gave her a carton of ready-made cigarettes and a pince-nez, the basic accoutrements of the liberated New Woman. Thus equipped, uncorseted, she began to meet the writers, dissidents, activists and artists of Victorian Bloomsbury in the British Museum Reading Room. Beatrice Potter saw her there a few months after Karl Marx's death, "comely, dressed in a slovenly picturesque way with curly black hair, flying about in all directions. Fine eyes full of life and sympathy, otherwise ugly features and expression and complexion showing signs of unhealthy excited life kept up with stimulants and tempered by narcotics". She loved champagne, and may have begun experimenting with opium.

Tussy found the intellectual community of the Reading Room another exciting stimulant. There she met Annie Besant, Bernard Shaw, and the South African New Woman novelist Olive Schreiner, who became an intimate friend and confidante. In 1882, they were comparing notes on female sexuality. There, too, she met her nemesis, Edward Aveling, a thin-lipped Darwinian secularist, journalist and aspiring dramatist who invited her to write about her father for the magazine he was co-editing. In a short time, she had agreed to join him as an editor of the magazine, and they had become a couple, although he was separated from a wife who refused to give him a divorce. Her friends accepted Aveling, but they didn't like him. They gossiped that he was selfish, unscrupulous and repulsive, with "the face and eyes of a lizard". No matter. Mohr's death had left a huge vacancy in her life, a space for a man to love and serve, and she could not leave it unfilled for long.

In the summer of 1884, she and the saurian Aveling agreed to live openly together, and announced their new status to all their comrades. As she wrote proudly to one young activist, "we have both felt that we were justified in setting aside all the false and really immoral bourgeois conventionalities, and I am happy to say we have received the only thing we really care about – the approbation of our friends and fellow-socialists". They enjoyed being the very model of the modern Marxist couple, and showing how free love and socialist principles could work in the home. Eventually, Eleanor decided that socialists could have servants, but in the beginning she struggled to cope with meals, laundry and housework herself, and Edward was "the very devil for untidiness". She was anxious about money, and toiling as a ghostwriter, typist, journalist, and teacher to support them, while he was gaily unconcerned, "going about like a happy child", she lamented to Schreiner, who had viewed him from the first with "horror" and "dread".

Still, in 1886, her most productive year, she completed the first English translation of Madame Bovary, collaborated on the first translation of Das Kapital, and starred in the first playreading of A Doll's House; Aveling was Torvald. They collaborated on a long essay, "The Woman Question", which Holmes calls "the founding text of socialist feminism". Its principles of sexual equality and socialist unity were eloquent, but Holmes leaves out the passages that make this manifesto so painful to read in the light of the clash of theory and practice in the Marx–Aveling ménage. Declaring that under socialism "monogamy will gain the day", they predicted "lasting, blending of two lives". Honesty, fidelity and truth would triumph in these utopian relationships; after the revolution, they promised, there would be none of "the hideous disguise, the constant lying, that makes the domestic life of almost all our English homes an organised hypocrisy". But free love was very costly for Eleanor Marx. In fact, Aveling was a chronic liar and womanizer, a scoundrel with scandalous habits of borrowing, expense account padding, even embezzling.

Eleanor covered up for him and defended him and pretended that he was a New Man. But his unpopularity isolated them, and his infidelities wounded her. Havelock Ellis said she attempted suicide in 1888 by taking a large dose of opium, and that he and Olive revived her. For another decade, she pressed on at her usual manic pace, writing, editing, lecturing, orating, teaching, organizing, travelling, studying Norwegian, learning Yiddish to speak to Jewish women in the East End, supporting gas workers, dock workers, match-girls, and onion-skinners (for Crosse and Blackwell) in a life she described as "one long strike", and generally representing Marxism to the world. To the huge audiences gathering to hear her speeches, she was a socialist saint.

Things were different at home. At the end of March 1898, she found out that Aveling's first wife had been dead for years, and he had recently married a twenty-two-year-old actress. Eleanor staged a dramatic suicide, imitating those of Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, or the heroine of the popular novel, The Woman Who Did. On the morning of March 31, she wrote to her lawyer to change her will, sent the maid to the chemist for chloroform and prussic acid, donned her favourite white summer dress, took the poison, and died. She left a scent of lavender and bitter almonds, two suicide notes, and the money from Engels's legacy. Her friends thought Aveling had confiscated the letter, skipped out of the house, and lied at the inquest. He got the money and spent most of it on his wife in the four months before he died.

Holmes readily admits that Eleanor Marx had "many shortcomings, frustrations, and spectacular failures", and her suicide was surely spectacular. Why did she do it? She had lived with Aveling for fourteen years, and his secret marriage was a stunning humiliation. Even worse, she had presented their home life as politically exemplary. But she was not a victim, although her practice did not match her theories. In the end, Eleanor Marx's great soul may have been the most inspiring part of her story. With the infectious conviction of her narrative, Rachel Holmes has restored her to history.