Eleanor Marx

by Yvonne Kapp

Eleanor was the youngest of three surviving Marx children. She was the only one to be born, live, love, work and die in England and to become a public figure in her own right. Yvonne Kapp, in this highly acclaimed biography, brilliantly succeeds in capturing Eleanor's spirit, from a lively child, opining on the world's affairs, to the new woman, aspiring to the stage, earning her living as a free intellectual, and helping to lead England's unskilled workers at the height of the new unionism; being always more than, yet at the same time inescapably, Marx's daughter. So inevitably--and fortunately--Eleanor's biography is also an unrivalled biography of the Marx house-hold in Victorian London, of the Marx circle, and especially of Frederick Engels, the family's extraordinary mentor.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Philosophy

900 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Yvonne Helene Kapp (née Mayer) was a British writer and political activist.

Reviews

[cheer]

The last two weeks of my life have been spent as a ghost. Detached from the time-locked vessel of my tangible body, I found myself in the middle of nineteenth century London. I spent some forty years spectating Eleanor Marx. From her upbringing in an overcrowded townhouse to her tragic premature demise by her own hand, I saw it all. Having now returned to my body, waking from what felt either a dream or a work of fiction but truly was reality long ago, I can confidently say that I have never connected so strongly to a historical figure as I now do with Eleanor Marx.
Yvonne Kapp’s work is more than just a biography of Eleanor Marx the individual, however: this is a history of the socialist labour movement in London as it emerged in the late nineteenth century.
Eleanor (affectionally known as Tussy to her family and friends) was a committed activist and trade union organizer. Heavily invested in politics as soon as she could speak, she would write letters of wisdom to President Lincoln across the Atlantic, hoping to lead him to victory in the American Civil War with her nine-year-old expertise.
As an adult, she made her living delivering speeches that attracted thousands of workers and peasants. She lectured on her father’s theories, on the necessity to join a union, and — prior to even the Suffragette movement — on the importance of “equality of the sexes” in the workplace. Ahead of her time in many ways, she ran into many of the same roadblocks of factionalism in socialist circles that we are still plagued with today. (The anarchists ruin everything, folks!)
Tussy also had a passion for theater and literature, and it was in these circles that she found her husband, Edward Aveling. Aveling was a very polarizing figure, and I can’t really convey the reasons why that is in this review, for it would take far too long. It’s enough to know that that immediately after her suicide, everyone close to Tussy blamed Aveling.
Something I did not expect to take away from a biography of Eleanor Marx was the incredible appreciation I developed for Friedrich Engels. Even if you already know that he financially supported the Marx family for their entire lives, you still can’t truly grasp the extent of the General’s (as he was nicknamed by Marx) unwavering generosity until you read Kapp’s incredible description of the Marx family’s home life. Engels willingly spent decades working in commerce for the sole purpose of providing for Karl Marx and his family so that Marx was free to write Capital. After Marx’s death, Engels committed the rest of his life to completing the remaining volumes of Capital, which was no easy feat. Engels’s generosity did not stop with his death, as he left nearly all his money to the Marx daughters and grandchildren. Adjusted for inflation, he made them millionaires.
There’s so much more I want to say here, but I really must shut up and urge you to read this biography if you care at all about Marxism! It does not idolize its subject nor her father, but through a historical account of their lives, it enables the reader to better connect with their written theoretical works. I can’t recommend this biography more. It’s arguably worth it alone for the transcripts of some of Eleanor’s fantastic speeches.

[Devin Stevenson]

A wonderful and detailed biography of a vital, overlooked historical figure, Marx's youngest daughter Eleanor. Her life, intertwined with Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels as dual father figures and so in a roundabout way provides a late life biography to each of them and vitally humanizes them. In one sense, a humanistic look into these lives feels at odds with Marxist materialist analysis. Yet in another, we see the historical and life context in which important works were written and what they meant to the times and struggle.
Karl Marx lived a somewhat tragic and short life, but in another sense this harsh life was all too common to his time and place. He devoted his health and vitality to the publishing of his brilliant socialist understanding. He knew that it was of utmost significance to the struggle against the horrid monstrosity of capitalism that he complete and disseminate his methodologies and theories for worker struggles around the world and through time. And this compounds the tragedy of his short life. He left so much of his works unfinished.
Fortunately, his collaborator and frequent financier, Fredrich Engels compiled his notes and for many years took to the dedicated task of completing Karl Marx's works and putting forward his own. Eleanor was a necessity to this task, assisting in translation and lecturing with her husband around the world to socialist and worker struggles. Karl Marx had completed and published volume 1 of Das Kapital before his death. Fredrich Engels went on to complete many of his works as well as to publish volumes 2 and 3. When Engels died, the manuscripts were left to Eleanor, including a nearly complete volume 4 to finally complete the work.
As dedicated as the "Marx Clique" was, their lives were busy, filled with misfortune, disease and hardship and Eleanor killed herself at the age of 43, herself not completing the work. However, we see the lives of those close to Karl Marx, understanding and even being consumed with the world historical significance of his elucidation of class struggle, the need to develop class awareness to seize the means of production and finally overthrow the capitalists and his theoretical methods and advancements of scientific socialism generally.
Though filled with struggle and hardship and personal dramas, paramount to these lives was translation and publication and socialist struggle. And beyond the advanced ideas, the love of humanity and faith in the possibility of a better world.