Revolutionary Road - A biography of Karl Marx's youngest daughter
Rachel Holmes: Eleanor Marx - A Life
Reviewed by KAREN OLSSON
It’s counter-intuitive to think of the British Museum as a
happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier
gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians. In the 1880s, these included
radicals like George Bernard Shaw, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Eleanor Marx, Karl
Marx’s youngest daughter. They worked there, and they talked during smoke
breaks and visits to Bloomsbury tea shops. They moved fluidly between politics
and the arts, deploring factory conditions as fervently as they dissected
Ibsen’s plays. The reading room was a vital seedbed for such Victorian-era
social-reform causes as women’s rights and trade-union organizing.
It was also a pickup scene. Edward Aveling, a science
lecturer, playwright, and political activist—and a notorious flirt—described
the reading room as “in equal degrees a menagerie and a lunatic asylum” and
made a tongue-in-cheek proposal that it be segregated by sex so as to bring
about “less talking and fewer marriages.” Among the liaisons fostered there was
Aveling’s with Eleanor, an energetic feminist and socialist who, after her
father’s death in 1883, blazed a bright trail of her own. As Rachel Holmes
illustrates in her engaging new biography, she emerged as one of the London
intellectual Left’s leading thinkers and activists, forcefully insisting that
advances for women and advances for workers be fought for in tandem.
And yet even as she strode confidently across the public
stage, Eleanor attached herself, for fourteen years, to Aveling, who turned out
to be the sort of person we might now call a lying scumbag. This mystified her
friends, and it remains something of an enigma today: While she and Aveling
were never legally married, she considered herself his wife, and she stood by
her disastrous man until the very bitter end.
Then again, a little Marx-family history reminds us what
strange arrangements and dark secrets lay behind the scrim of Victorian
domesticity. One need look no further than Eleanor’s own parents, a
prototypically unpredictable Victorian union: Jenny von Westphalen, a debutante
from an aristocratic Prussian family, and Karl Marx, a family friend of hers
but also a Jewish philosophy student. This match, like many others forged in
the centers of European intellectual life, suggests that the more privileged
partner aspired to something other than her foreordained social destiny—in
Westphalen’s case, the life of a typical bourgeois woman in the provincial
German city of Trier.
She went on to endure many hardships, none of them
bourgeois. Three of the six children she bore died young; her family, which
eventually settled in London, was in near-constant financial straits; and in
1851 her housekeeper and confidante, Helene “Lenchen” Demuth, gave birth to a
son fathered by Karl. (After that, Lenchen stayed on with the Marxes, while the
child, Freddy, was sent to live with another family. For most of her life,
Eleanor understood Freddy Demuth to be the unacknowledged son of Friedrich
Engels.)
As Holmes tells it, young Eleanor—nicknamed “Tussy”—was
protected from the brunt of all that. With two mother figures in Jenny and
Lenchen, as well as two much older sisters, she was the pet of the household,
who by the age of six could recite large chunks of Shakespeare and, a few years
later, wrote letters to Abraham Lincoln advising him on the Civil War. Her
father doted on her, told her stories, gave her books, and played chess with
her—when he wasn’t at work on Das Kapital, or felled by illness, or
shuffling debts. Periodically, the Marxes’ financial situation grew dire, but
then a loan from a family member or a gift from the well-off, avuncular Engels
would make it possible for Karl to continue his low-paying work.
Eleanor identified with her father, and he with her (“Tussy is me,”
she recalled him saying). She received almost no formal education but learned
at his feet, and in her early teens she became his research assistant and
secretary—much more than an honorific post, as local and national workers’
organizations throughout Europe began expanding and consolidating across
borders. Karl was at the forefront of the new international movement, and the
revolutionary leaders of Europe became Eleanor’s pen pals. Her first long
romantic relationship was with Hippolyte Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, an exiled
Parisian Communard seventeen years her senior.
By then she was surely aware of her mother’s depressions and
of some of the tribulations that marriage and childbearing had brought to her
two older sisters. Laura, the middle Marx daughter, would lose all three of her
babies at young ages, while the eldest sister, nicknamed Jennychen, would find
herself unhappily married and exhausted by caring for her six children. Like
her mother before her, Eleanor wanted to make a different sort of life for
herself.
Holmes, the author of two previous biographies and a
coeditor of an anthology called Fifty Shades of Feminism, writes
with great sympathy for her subject. Her purpose, it seems, is less to analyze
or contextualize Eleanor Marx than to tell us the story of an exemplary public
figure. To the extent that Holmes gets under Eleanor’s skin, she characterizes
her as a woman with too much empathy for others, a condition that left her
unable to care for herself and predisposed toward “the whole infuriating
syndrome of Victorian feminine neurosis”—aka hysteria.
The vivacious girl became a bold woman who tended to overtax
herself. In her twenties, she undertook paid editorial work, translated her
lover’s memoir of the Paris Commune, continued to help her father, and tried to
become an actress. Karl grudgingly agreed to pay for stage training, but before
beginning her lessons, during a period when her father, her cancer-stricken
mother, and Lenchen traveled to France—leaving Eleanor to her own devices for
six weeks—she worked herself to the bone, barely ate or slept, and suffered a
nervous collapse. Holmes tallies the causes:
Use of too many stimulants. Insomnia. Depression. Frustrated
desire. Surfeit of unchannelled ambition, intellectual talent and energy.
Resentment at being for so long a repressed, obedient daughter fighting her
contrapuntal desire to break free and strike out on a line of her own.
Passionate will to live her own life. Underpinning the intensity of her
reaction: guilt, regret, foreboding, self-doubt, insecurity. And . . . her
awareness . . . that she was losing her mother. Grief.
No doubt at least some of these were to blame, but in
leaping from the onset of Eleanor’s crisis to what reads like voice-over
narration for a TV documentary, Holmes seems more interested in Eleanor the
feminist case study than Eleanor the woman. It seems worth noting that the
meltdown happened after she had been freed from her daughterly obligations and
left alone to work. The room of her own quickly became a prison.
It’s also striking just how much loss Eleanor had to contend
with during her young adulthood. The story of the Marxes is laden with physical
and mental illnesses...
read more:
