Eleanor Marx (1855–1898)

Life, Work, Contacts

John Stokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315363592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Karl Marx's youngest daughter Eleanor (1855-98) is one of the most significant figures in the cultural politics of the late nineteenth century. As a feminist and radical socialist she never flinched from confrontation; as an aspiring actress, working journalist and literary translator she advanced contemporary understanding of Flaubert, Ibsen and Shakespeare. This collection of newly commissioned essays helps to establish the full extent of her outstanding achievements.

Chapter 1

‘A Daughter of Today’: The Socialist-Feminist Intellectual as Woman of Letters

Lyn Pykett

The would-be student of Eleanor Marx is likely to have an experience that is the reverse of the one described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own when she went to the British Museum to research the topic of ‘Woman’. On consulting the Museum catalogue, Woolf experienced ‘five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment’ on discovering that woman is ‘the most discussed animal in the universe’.¹ The present-day researcher on Eleanor Marx, whether electronically scanning the British Library catalogues, searching other databases, or poring over the indexes of dusty tomes, is more likely to be filled with stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment on discovering how little discussed their subject is. To be sure there is Yvonne Kapp’s monumental two-volume study, and Chushichi Tsuzuki’s terser biography. However, when one turns to the dictionaries of women writers, of feminists, or of socialists, or when one searches the indexes of histories of socialism or feminism in Britain, one is likely to be disappointed.

On looking up ‘Marx, E.’ one is usually directed to ‘see Aveling’, but seeing Aveling often results in disappointment – as Eleanor Marx repeatedly discovered to her cost. Indeed, the experience of trying to look up ‘Marx, E.’ brings to mind Jean McCrindle’s review of the 1977 BBC television series about Eleanor Marx’s life, written by Andrew Davies, in which she laments that ‘The Radio Times publicity and the credit sequence where the men in her life loom up and disappear beyond her left ear, place her firmly in a male context, dominated by her “father’s overpowering personality”’.² My essay, like others in this collection, seeks to examine the numerous things that loom up behind Eleanor Marx’s left ear other than the men in her life. It will look at Marx not as the daughter of the father of socialism, but as ‘a daughter of today’, to quote the title of a novel published in 1895 by the British-based, Canadian novelist Sara Jeanette Duncan (Mrs Everard Cotes). For, although Marx was an exceptional woman, born into an exceptional family, her story is, in many ways, a stereotypical story of the modern woman, at least as this creature is represented in the press and in fiction at the fin de siècle.

Marx died in 1898, only four years after the annus mirabilis of the New Woman. 1894, in many ways the year of the New Woman, saw the publication of several important novels and collections of stories: Emma Frances Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman, Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, George Egerton’s Discords, Annie Holdsworth’s Joanna Traill, Spinster, Iota’s A Yellow Aster, Elizabeth Robins’s George Mandeville’s Husband, George Paston’s [Emily Morse Symonds] A Modern Amazon; there were articles in the North American Review by ‘Ouida’ and Sarah Grand discussing the phenomenon, and W.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews essay on ‘The Novel of the Modern Woman’, as well as numerous Punch cartoons and lampoons.³ However, although Marx barely outlived the zenith of the New Woman, her life in the early 1880s prefigured those numerous narratives which poured from the presses in the latter years of that decade and the early years of the 1890s, and which became a torrent in 1894 and 1895. In the last fifteen years or so of her short life, Marx recapitulated – or anticipated – various stages or aspects of the New Woman identity – from ‘Revolting Daughter’⁴ to suicide, acting out various versions of the New Woman struggle on the way.

The picture that emerges from her letters, from contemporary accounts, and from modern biographies, reveals Marx as a relative creature, shaped and limited by her daughterly and later ‘wifely’ roles, and as a ‘revolting daughter’ who resisted the roles in which her parent sought to cast her. Yet at the same time she was also a dutiful daughter who sacrificed her own health and well-being to look after her ailing parents and sisters, and her sisters’ children. Her own sense of this role and of some of its costs and injustices are powerfully revealed in a letter to Olive Schreiner in 1881:

My mother and I loved each other passionately, but she did not understand me as father did. One of the bitterest of many bitter sorrows in my life is that my mother died, thinking, despite all our love, that I had been hard and cruel, and never guessing that to save her and father sorrow I had sacrificed the best, freshest years of my life.⁵

Like many New Woman daughters of the day, Marx was, simultaneously or by turns: a British Museum hack, a teacher, an aspiring artist, and a journalist and reviewer; she set herself up in the business of typewriting; she visited the East End with Margaret Harkness; she was a public speaker who could sway her audience with her eloquence or simply by her stage presence; she was a freethinker, a proponent of free unions (and a troubled participant in one), a wild woman as politician and social insurgent (to borrow the terms of Eliza Lynn Linton’s articles in the Nineteenth Century in 1891); she was a proponent of literary innovation (in her introduction to her 1886 translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), and a proponent and promulgator of ‘Ibscenity’ through her involvement, with Edward Aveling, George Bernard Shaw and others, in readings and performances of Ibsen’s plays, as a translator of An Enemy of the People (as An Enemy of Society) and The Lady from the Sea, and in her satire on the English response to Ibsen (written with Israel Zangwill) ‘A Doll’s House Repaired’ (1891).

Marx also acted out, or was perceived in terms of, that most typical of New Woman roles: the hysteric or neurotic, the degenerate or erotomaniac. It is striking to note precisely how closely some of Freud and Breuer’s descriptions of the dispositions and circumstances of their hysterical patients in Studies on Hysteria resemble her situation. Take, for example, Freud’s description of Fraulein Elizabeth Von R:

The youngest of three daughters, she was tenderly attached to her parents … Her mother’s health was frequently troubled … Thus … she found herself drawn into especially intimate contact with her father, … who used to say that this daughter … took the place of a son and a friend with whom he could exchange thoughts. Although the girl’s mind found intellectual stimulation from this relationship with her father, he did not fail to observe that her mental constitution was on that account departing from the ideal which people like to see realised in a girl. He jokingly called her ‘cheeky’ and ‘cocksure’, and warned her against being too positive in her judgements and against her habit of regardlessly telling people the truth … She was in fact greatly discontented with being a girl. She was full of ambitious plans. She wanted to study or to have a musical training, and she was indignant at the idea of having to sacrifice her inclinations and her freedom of judgement by marriage. As it was she nourished herself on her pride in her father and in the prestige … of her family, and she jealously guarded everything that was bound up with these advantages. The unselfishness, however, with which she put her mother and elder sisters first, when an occasion arose, reconciled her parent completely to the harsher side of her character.⁶

Like Frau Elizabeth, Marx had a sick mother and a intimate emotional attachment to her sisters and father. She also enjoyed a particularly close intellectual companionship with her father. Moreover, the intellectuality, and what was perceived as the ‘cheekiness’, and ‘cockiness’ of both young women, together with their shared aspiration for an independent life and an artistic career, marked them – as it did many New Woman of the fin de siècle, in fiction and in fact – as untypical of their gender. Indeed, some of her contemporaries simply decoded her in terms of current representations of the New Woman as hysteric and/or degenerate. This is clearly what Beatrice Potter (later Webb) did in this diary entry for 24 May 1883:

In afternoon went to British Museum and met Miss Marx in refreshment room … Gains her livelihood by teaching ‘literature’ etc., and corresponding for socialist newspapers … In person she is 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. Lives alone … evidently peculiar views on love etc., and should think she has somewhat ‘natural’ relations with men! Should fear the chances against her remaining long within the pale of respectable society.⁷

Speculations about sex and drugs apart, this description shows a remarkable overlap with Marion Skinner’s (later Comyn’s) description of Marx as the New Girl she knew in the early 1880s – a girl whose wilfulness was indulged by her father:

Wilful indeed she was, but she was also an unusually brilliant creature, with a clear logical brain, a shrewd knowledge of men and a wonderful memory … She either passionately admired or desperately scorned, she loved fervently or she hated with vehemence. Middle courses never commended themselves to her. She had amazing vitality, extraordinary receptivity, and she was the gayest creature in the world – when she was not the most miserable.⁸

One of my aims in insisting on the typicality of some of the particularities of Marx’s history is precisely to historicize that history. It is instructive to stand back from the heroinism of accounts such as Yvonne Kapp’s, and to see Marx as the protagonist of a different kind of story. I tell this ‘different’ story, not in order to privilege it, but rather to think about its politics.

Kapp claims that Marx ‘went her own way without fuss, feminism or false constraint … objectively alive to the social injustices that shackled women’s freedom, subjectively free’.⁹ Certainly Marx had little time for the causes taken up by those whom she regarded as the parasite women of the middle and upper classes, but on many occasions she revealed herself as an instinctive feminist: for example, when she wrote to her sister Laura in 1890 about the injustice with which the party seemed to be treating Louise Kautsky:

I am sorry for Louise. Bebel and all the others have told her it is her duty to the Party to stop [with Engels]. It hardly seems fair to her. She was getting on so well at Vienna & to sacrifice her whole career is no trivial matter. – No one would ask a man to do that. She is still so young – only just 30. It seems not right to shut her up, & keep her from every chance of a fuller and happier life.¹⁰

Far from going her own way ‘subjectively free’ and without fuss, feminism or false constraint’ Marx, like so many of her contemporaries – in fiction and in life – struggled to find her way and to define a direction for herself. She made a great deal of fuss and suffered extraordinary turmoil; and she repeatedly came into conflict with both the material and the subjective constraints (false or otherwise) of the circumstances of the life of the middle-class woman of the late nineteenth century.

As the daughter of a world-historical individual, whose home was a frequent meeting place for European intellectuals and political activists, Marx’s upbringing was in many respects exceptional. However, in other respects it was not, since her parents sought to give their daughters the upbringing and social acquirements that were proper for middle-class girls who were destined to be wives. Like many girls of her class, Marx first sought independence in a teaching job, beginning work at a girl’s boarding school in Brighton in 1873. This was a move for which her parents had little enthusiasm, despite their precarious financial position. Her mother tried (without success) to get her to leave the Miss Halls’ school in order to accompany Helen Demuth on a visit to her ailing sister in Germany. This subterfuge was attempted despite the fact that Mrs Marx claimed, in a letter, to understand the importance of work to her daughter: ‘I alone understand how dearly you long for work and independence, the only two things that can help one over the sorrows and cares of present day society’.¹¹ ‘Work’ and ‘independence’ were words that were to become a kind of litany in Marx’s letters of the 1880s. However, this early attempt at resisting parental pressure ended in failure: she soon retired hurt from her foray into teaching, suffering from one of the nervous collapses which were to punctuate her life, as they did the histories of many fictional New Women in the 1890s.

For much of the 1880s Marx followed the path taken by many of her female contemporaries and foregrounded in much New Woman fiction, becoming a sort of woman of letters by undertaking ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 ‘A Daughter of Today’: The Socialist-Feminist Intellectual as Woman of Letters
• 2 Fictions of Engagement: Eleanor Marx, Biographical Space
• 3 Revisiting Edward Aveling
• 4 Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen
• 5 Eleanor Marx and Shakespeare
• 6 Eleanor Marx and Gustave Flaubert
• 7 The Genders of Socialism: Eleanor Marx and Oscar Wilde
• 8 Socialist Feminism and Sexual Instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy
• 9 ‘Is this Friendship?’: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the Idea of Socialist Community
• 10 A Moment of Being: Miss Marx, Miss Pater, ‘Miss Ambient’
• 11 Radical Voices: Eleanor Marx and Victoria Woodhull
• 12 ‘Tantalising Glimpses’: The Intersecting Lives of Eleanor Marx and Mathilde Blind
• Index