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Eleanor Marx’s Political Legacy—self sacrifice or self‐realisation?

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09612020701447574

1747-583X

Sally Alexander,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Abstract Eleanor Marx’s life invites thought about the politics of Victorian feminism, what endures in the minds of later generations and what is forgotten. Eleanor moves in and out of the feminist pantheon—prophet of Marxism, Ibsenite new woman, trade union organiser—her elusiveness repeating her own self‐doubt and ambivalence towards feminism. This article sketches the sequence of identifications in Eleanor’s political subjectivity and some tensions between them. Virginia Woolf’s appeal to ‘find the law’ (like Antigone) encompasses Eleanor’s ambivalence, identifying it both as a perpetual theme of twentieth‐century feminist thought and of human subjectivity itself. Acknowledgements Thanks to Cora Kaplan, Ellen Ross, Gareth Stedman Jones, and anonymous readers of the Review for constructive criticism. Notes [1] Yvonne Kapp (1976) Eleanor Marx, Volume II, The Crowded Years 1884–1898 (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p. 703. Kapp interviewed everyone she could find who had known Eleanor and her family. [2] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 41 [3] Wilhelm Liebknecht, Introduction, Eleanor Marx Aveling (1896) The Working Class Movement in England, A Brief Historical Sketch (London, Clerkenwell: Lexicon edn.), p. 1. Engels, known as ‘Staff’ or ‘the General’ to the Marx daughters, quoted in Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 360. The ‘glamour of memory’ comes from Ford Maddox Ford (1905) The Soul of London, A Survey of a Modern City (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 22. This article will use ‘Eleanor’ to distinguish her from other family members. [4] Yvonne Kapp, 1903–99, communist and writer, became fascinated by Eleanor as she translated Friedrich Engels/Laura and Paul Lafargue correspondence. She collaborated with Allen Hutt, the communist historian already at work on a biography, until his death. Volume I, Family Life 1855–1884, appeared in 1972, volume II, The Crowded Years 1884–1898, in 1976. Chushichi Tsuzuki’s The Life of Eleanor Marx 1855–1898: a socialist tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press) appeared in 1967. Kapp’s sources included the Marx Lenin Institutes in Berlin and Moscow; the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; Bottigelli Papers in Paris; (1982) The Daughters of Karl Marx, Family Correspondence, 1868–1898 (London: Andre Deutsch), commentary and notes Olga Meier, translated and adapted Faith Evans, Introduction Sheila Rowbotham. Two plays were written of her life: Michael Hastings, Tussy is Me in the 1960s; Alison Rose adapted and performed a one woman show, Tussy: the letters of Eleanor Marx, in the 1980s. See John Stokes’s ‘Introduction’ in John Stokes (Ed.) (2000) Eleanor Marx (1855–1898), Life, Work, Contacts (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 8–12 for further examples. [5] E. J. E. Hobsbawm (2004–06) Marx, Karl Heinrich (1818–1883), revolutionary and thinker, New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 10. [6] E. P. Thompson (1994) ‘Eleanor Marx’, Persons, Polemics, Historical Essays (London: Merlin Press), p. 10. [7] E. J. E. Hobsbawm says that Marx felt uncomfortable with the term ‘Marxism’: ‘Marx, Thinker and Revolutionary’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, p. 12 . [8] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 9. Karl Marx dominates volume I; a third of the second is given over to Friedrich Engels. [9] Michael Holroyd (1988) Bernard Shaw, Volume 1, The Search for Love (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 124. Alex Owen (2004) The Place of Enchantment: British occultism and the culture of the modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), Introduction and ch. 1; Joy Dixon (2001) Divine Feminine: theosophy and feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). For an early twentieth‐century mystical feminist see Mary Gawthorpe in Jill Liddington (2006) Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote (London: Virago Press), pp. 32–52. [10] Lyn Pykett (2000) ‘A Daughter of Today’: the socialist feminist intellectual as woman of letters, in Stokes (Ed.) Eleanor Marx, pp. 13–22. [11] Sally Ledger, Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen, in Stokes (Ed.) Eleanor Marx, pp. 53–68. [12] Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment, puts the drive for ‘self realisation’ at the centre of ‘new occultism’ in the 1890s, compatible with social justice. [13] Marian Comyn (1922) My Recollections of Karl Marx, The Nineteenth Century and After, XlX–XX, vol. XC1, p. 166. [14] The plight of the governess had been one of the spurs to the nineteenth‐century midwomen’s movement and equal pay a feminist demand beyond the Equal Pay Act (1974) to the present. Harriet Martineau’s anon. essay, ‘Female Industry’, in The Edinburgh Review, Jan–April 1859, vol. CIX, pp. 293–336, is the classic liberal account of women’s employment mid‐century. Eleanor Marx sent a cutting exposing the ‘horrible position of governesses’ to a friend in the 1870s: Kapp, Family Life, p. 169. There is no bibliography of Eleanor Marx’s writings as far as I know. [15] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 109. Eleanor’s was the first translation of Capital, vol. one, twenty years after its publication. [16] Felix Barker (1954) New Yorker, 27 November, p. 179. All Eleanor’s writings are characterised by the researcher’s conscientious attention to detail. [17] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 26. [18] William Greenslade, ‘Revisiting Edward Aveling’, in Stokes (Ed.) Eleanor Marx, pp. 41–52, 44–45. [19] Kapp, Crowded Years, pp. 27, 31. Eleanor described Aveling variously as ‘like a happy child with never a thought of sorrow or sin’, ‘good and kind’ with a Micawber‐like optimism. The Daughters of Karl Marx, pp. 183, 260. [20] Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Volume 1, p. 154. Aveling was the model for Louis Dubedat in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma. E. P. Thompson points out the ‘deliberate blindness and deafness’ to her husband’s shortcomings that afflicts Dubedat’s wife, in Persons and Polemics, Historical Essays, pp. 10, 11, 18. [21] Kapp, Crowded Years, pp. 170–191. Eleanor spoke of Aveling’s ‘mental disease’. [22] Evelyn Frye had appeared with him in The Landlady. Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 678. [23] Judith R. Walkowitz makes W. T. Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute’ one foundation for the modern psyche, in (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: narratives of sexual danger in late Victorian London (London: Virago), chs 3, 4; M. Willson Disher (1954) Melodrama: plots that thrilled (London: Rockcliff), p. xiii for righteousness. Ledger shows Ibsen to be a better guide to Eleanor’s reasoning: ‘Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen’, in Stokes (Ed.) Eleanor Marx. [24] The childhood Kapp never had, Alison Light has pointed out, ‘Preface’, Yvonne Kapp (2003) Time Will Tell: memoirs (London and New York: Verso), pp. xi–xiii. [25] The Daughters of Karl Marx, pp. 252–255, for instance. [26] All three of Laura and Paul Lafargue’s children and three of Jenny’s six died in infancy. Jenny’s surviving three were estranged from their Marx relatives by their father, Charles Longuet’s political disaffection from Marxism. [27] Kapp, Family Life, Appx 1, pp. 289–299; Kapp, Crowded Years, Epilogue, pp. 715–721. See also The Daughters of Karl Marx, Appx 4, pp. 311–312. [28] Kapp is quoting Robert Browning, Time Will Tell, p. 265. See also, Lynne Segal (2004) Formations of Feminism: memoirs of the left (11), Radical Philosophy, 123, 8– [29] S. Alexander, ‘Interview with Yvonne Kapp’ (1994) Becoming a Woman, and Other Essays in Nineteenth and Twentieth Feminist History (London: Virago), pp. 183–200, expands on this account. [30] Kapp, Time Will Tell, p. 144. A drawing of Henry Hyndman by Edmond X. Kapp is reprinted in Crowded Years, pp. 190–191. [31] Kapp, Time Will Tell, p. 167. [32] Ibid, p. 173, S. Alexander, ‘Interview’, Becoming a Woman, pp. 193–194, 199. [33] See Faith Evans’s fine discussion of Eleanor as translator: ‘Eleanor Marx and Gustave Flaubert’, in Stokes (Ed.) Eleanor Marx, pp. 83–98. [34] Raphael Samuel (2006) The Lost World of British Communism (London and New York: Verso), pp. 54–56. For another reading of communism’s austere self‐discipline in the 1940s, Edward Upward (1969, 1979 edn) The Rotten Elements (London, Melbourne and New York: Quartet Books). [35] Kapp, Crowded Years, pp. 105, 206, 261, and throughout. [36] Ibid. pp. 260–261. [37] Seth Koven (2004) Slumming: sexual and social politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press); Ellen Ross (2007) Slum Travellers, Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press). [38] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 233. 1887 was a year of extreme trade depression, and Queen Victoria’s jubilee. The demonstration was called by the Metropolitan Radical Association and the Irish National League. Gareth Stedman Jones (1971) Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 296–297, argues that fear of the unemployed London’s ‘casual residuum’, culminating in ‘bloody Sunday’ of 13 November 1887, provoked the ‘intellectual assault which began to be mounted against laissez‐faire’ from left and right which instituted a new form of liberalism, Charles Booth’s Survey of London, and ‘the emergence of a social imperialist position which linked the question of poverty and unemployment with imperial expansion and national security’. For a fuller account of the events leading up to ‘bloody Sunday’, including the role of the Irish question, see E. P. Thompson (1955, 1977 edn.) William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press), ch. 5, ‘The Socialists Make Contact with the Masses’. [39] This and the quotes in the following paragraph are taken from Kapp, Crowded Years, pp. 261–266. Ernest Jones (1959) Free Associations, memories of a psycho‐analysist (London: The Hogarth Press), p. 91 describes similar scenes when, a medical student in Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, he ‘came close to the bedrock of existence’. [40] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 264. Neither would suicide have been unexpected on return from the States in 1887; ibid., p. 194. Aveling was not capable of being ‘moved by human misery and injustice’, a measure of a socialist for Kapp, Family Life, p. 271. [41] Kapp had a Freudian analysis in the early thirties, which might explain her respect for psychic change, although she is more reticent about the antagonisms in Eleanor’s heterosexual desire; the dimensions of her nervous breakdowns. [42] Carolyn Steedman, Fictions of Engagement: Eleanor Marx biographical space, in Stokes (Ed.) Eleanor Marx, pp. 23–40. She might have been paraphrasing Beatrice Potter in May 1883: ‘One thing is clear to my mind, it is distinctly advantageous to us to go amongst the poor. We can get from them an experience of life which is novel and interesting; the study of their lives and surroundings gives us the facts wherewith we can attempt to solve the social problems; so contact with them develops on the whole our finer qualities, disgusting us with our false and worldly application of men and things and educating in us a thoughtful benevolence’. Norman MacKenzie & Jeanne MacKenzie (Eds) (1982) The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Volume One: Glitter Around and Darkness Within (London: Virago with the London School of Economics), p. 85. [43] The Shorter OED defines empathy as ‘The power of projecting one’s personality into, and so completely understanding, the object of contemplation’. R. D. Hinschelwood (1989) The Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books), p. 295, describes it as a benign form of projective identification, ‘in particular, it is an experiencing part of oneself that is inserted in order to gain, in phantasy (someone else’s) experience’. [44] Eleanor Marx & Edward Aveling (1886) ‘The Woman Question’, Westminster Review, pp. 7–8. Published as a pamphlet by Sonnensschein, Lowrey and Co., 1886. [45] The first two had died in 1850 and 1852 of meningitis and tuberculosis respectively, both of them under a year old. Mouche also died of a tubercular illness. Jenny Marx had twelve pregnancies altogether. [46] Eleanor Marx Aveling (Ed.) ‘Note’, in Karl Marx (1896) Revolution and Counter‐Revolution (London: Union Books), p .vi. [47] Some of Karl Marx’s most important writings were written at this time: on the Crimean War, Indian Mutiny, Preface to a Critique of Political Economy, and Value, Price and Profit. [48] Marx, Revolution and Counter‐Revolution, p. v; Wilhelm Liebknecht (1896, 1975 edn.) Karl Marx, Biographical Memoirs (London: Journeymen’s Press), pp. 112–113. Helen Demuth supervised the household provision, which included beer brewing, bread making, clothes making, etc. [49] Nora’s housekeeper, in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, also had an illegitimate child sent out to nurse so that she could care for Nora. [50] Marx’s doctors prescribed extra food, port and brandy in large quantities to cure his ills. [51] Engels paid off Marx’s debts and settled £350 a year on the Marx family for the next five or six years after his retirement from the Manchester branch of the family firm in 1869. He gave unstintingly to all of them thereafter, Kapp, Family Life, p. 167. [52] Kapp, Family Life, pp. 298–299. [53] Ibid., pp. 171–172. [54] Ibid., pp. 41–42. Jenny Marx’s memoir has been lost by the British Library. [55] Liebknecht, Karl Marx, Biographical Memoirs, p. 113. [56] Kapp, Family Life, p. 237. [57] Laura married Paul Lafargue, medical student, lecturer. Three children died in infancy in the early 1870s. Jenny married Charles Longuet, teacher and journalist; she gave birth to five sons and one daughter between 1873and 1882; see note 27. [58] Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Eleanor’s doctor in the 1870s, visited every day during one breakdown. Eleanor’s symptoms included complete exhaustion, loss of appetite, overwork and suicidal feelings, and were treated by rest, early nights and spa cures. Her own diagnosis blamed ‘mental worry’. The Daughters of Karl Marx, p. 145. See also endnote 96. [59] Mohr’s disapproval of and political antipathy towards her chosen lover did not extend to his history of the Paris Commune, 1876, which Eleanor translated ten years later, and which he, Marx, supervised with meticulous care through the press. Kapp, Family Life, p. 229. [60] Kapp, Family Life, pp. 89, 117, 213, 136. [61] Shakespeare was also Tom Mann’s favourite poet. Dona Torr, Tom Mann and his Times, 1956, pp .130, 179. Torr’s biography was an inspiration for E. P. Thompson: see Preface, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary, p. xi. Laurence Irving (1951) Henry Irving, The Actor and His World, by his Grandson (London: Faber & Faber), ch. XIX. [62] Ruth Livesey (2000) Dollie Maitland and the Ethical Aestheticism of Fin de Siècle Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34, pp. 495–517, p. 502 refers, quoting Maitland, to Eleanor’s reading club. [63] Kapp, Family Life, p. 222. [64] Ibid., p. 233. [65] Ibid., pp. 58, 227, 235. [66] Ibid., p. 177. Sheila Rowbotham wonders at Eleanor’s ‘self‐deprecation … inner worthlessness’ which shadowed her public political world and theatrical self. Introduction, The Daughters of Karl Marx, p. xxxi. [67] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 16. [68] Richard Rive (Ed.) (1987) Olive Schreiner, Letters, Volume 1 1871–1899 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 48–49. See also, Phyllis Grosskurth (1981) Havelock Ellis, a biography (London, Melbourne and New York: Quartet Books), pp. 108–110. [69] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 27. Ruth First & Ann Scott (1980) Olive Schreiner, A Biography (London: Andre Deutsch), pp. 134–136, argues with Kapp over intimacy between the two women. [70] Havelock Ellis (1890) The New Spirit (London: Bell), p. 154. Eleanor translated ‘The Lady from the Sea’, and ‘The Enemy of the People’. Felix Barker adds ‘The Wild Duck’, New Yorker, 27 November 1924, p. 175, not listed elsewhere that I can find. [71] Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p. 199, who shows how Shaw used Ibsen to preach Fabianism but admired above all his sense of theatre. [72] George Bernard Shaw (1891) The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London: Bell), especially chs 4, 5. [73] Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Life of Eleanor Marx, p. 161. [74] She was speaking of Annie Besant, Malthusian, freethinker, theosophist, Indian nationalist and forerunner of Eleanor in Aveling’s affections. MacKenzie & MacKenzie (Eds) The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Volume One, 1873–1892, pp. 221, 223, 136–137. Potter (as she was in 1887, aged twenty‐nine) shudders at Besant’s ‘blighted wifehood and motherhood and her thirst for power and defiance of the world … It is not womanly to thrust yourself before the world. A woman, in all the relations of life, should be sought’. Potter dressed up herself in 1888 as a working girl to investigate working‐class life, p. 231. Potter had met Eleanor in 1883, in the refreshment rooms of the British Museum when the latter was editing Progress. They argued about the value of Christianity—an immoral illusion to Eleanor, a thing of ‘beauty to Miss Potter’. Eleanor was ‘comely’ in person, ‘dressed in a slovenly picturesque way with curly black hair flying in all directions’ and fine eyes. Potter also thought she used stimulants and had ‘unnatural relations’ with men, pp. 87–88. [75] Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, p.196. [76] Ibid., p. 173. [77] The Avelings quarrelled with the grandiosity and jingoism of the SDF’s leader, Henry Hyndman, though Eleanor made friends with him again in the 1890s over Home Rule, and they rejoined in 1896 after Engels’ death. Crowded Years, Part One, Laborious Days. The story is told in full in E. P. Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary, Part III, especially chs 3, 7. [78] Marx had died in 1883 with only the first volume of Capital published (1867); the remaining volumes, on which he was working throughout the last eighteen years of his life, remained in fragments and notes. Engels had the task of putting these together after his death, with the help of transcribers, translators and the Avelings (Marx’s handwriting was notoriously impossible to decipher). Kapp, Family Life, pp 277–279. See also, Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Engels’ Contribution to Marxism’, in E. J. Hobsbawm (Ed.) (1981) History of Marxism, Volume 1 (Brighton: Harvester). See also his New ODNB entry on Friedrich Engels, and E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Marx, Thinker and Revolutionary’, New ODNB, for Engels’ injection of Darwinism into the Marxist ‘compendium’. [79] Karl Marx (1859, 1970 edn) ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London and Moscow: Lawrence & Wishart), p. 181. [80] See note 5. Sheila Rowbotham (1972) Women Resistance and Revolution (London: Allen Lane), pp. 62–63, uses the philosophic manuscripts of 1844, which borrow from Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist, to give a fuller reading of women as symbolic of man’s relationship to nature, as a form of private property, and marriage as a relation of prostitution exemplary of the ‘universal prostitution of the worker to capital’ which Victorian feminists absorbed from the Utopians rather than Marxism. Utopian socialism became profoundly influential again for the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. [81] Liebknecht, Karl Marx, Biographical Memoirs, p. 9. [82] Her history of the British Labour Movement, based on notes of Graham Wallas among other things, included all these influences, and incidentally anticipated later interwar British communist people’s histories. E. M. Aveling (1896) The Working Class Movement of England. [83] Cigar makers, book binders, dressmakers and tailoresses, upholsteresses, laundresses and miscellaneous factory trades were in the League. One hundred and fifty thousand women belonged to trade unions during the early 1890s according to the WTUL; Beatrice and Sydney Webb estimate 100,000 in 1891 (1894) The History of Trades Unions 1666–1920 (London: 1919 edn, printed by the authors for Trade Unionists), p. 424, and see p. 235 for Karl Marx in 1864 on the ‘servitude’ of the ‘man of labour’. S. Alexander, ‘Bringing Women into Line with Men: the Women’s Trade Union League 1876–1920’, in S. Alexander (1994) Becoming a Woman and Other Essays (London: Virago), pp. 57–74 . [84] Kapp, Crowded Years, pp. 474–475. They also called her ‘Good old Stoker’! [85] Ibid., p. 360 [86] The Women’s Trade Union Review (WTUR), 4 January 1892, p. 2. C. Black left the WTUL in 1889 to form the Women’s Trades Association of East London, which became the Women’s Industrial Council. [87] WTUR, October 1894, pp. 9, 10; WTUR, October 1893, p. 8; WTUR, July 1897, and throughout 1900s. [88] Gertrude Tuckwell (1949) Reminiscences, unpublished ms, TUC Library, pp. 20–26, 191. Tuckwell tells of her aunt, when heckled ‘Looks like a Salvation Army’, retorted, ‘It is the Salvation Army’, p. 97. Eleanor used Home Rule as an argument for the effectiveness of parliamentary participation. [89] Charles Dilke (1905) Memoir, Book of the Spiritual Life (London, John Murray), p. 9. [90] Women’s Union Journal, no. 120, vol. xi, January 1886, p. 3. [91] George W. Johnson & Lucy A. Johnson (Eds) (1909) Josephine E. Butler, An Autobiographical Memoir (Bristol and London: J. W. Arrowsmith), p. 58. Maria Sharpe, Autobiographical Notes, Autumn 1884, July 1885. Sharpe eventually married Karl Pearson, eugenicist, founder of the Club; he used to talk of suicide, Pearson Papers, UCL Library. Sharpe refused Eleanor’s membership of the Men and Women’s Club, on the grounds of her union with Aveling. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 141. Walkowitz’s intellectual histories of the Clubs’ participants, the meanings of politics and woman’s place in politics are essential reading. [92] Marx & Aveling, ‘The Woman Question’, pp. 8, 12. Suicides among women between 16 and 21 were usually caused by unwanted births; ‘disappointed love’ was a euphemism for ‘ungratified sexual instincts’, p. 13. [93] Listen to the young Sylvia Pankhurst (her syntax): ‘I would not lose the power to pour myself out for others to forget myself in enthusiasms for persons and things almost I fear that if I lose the ability to be cast down to be all but consumed in grief even for slight things in any direction so too I shall lose the power to love without reserve’, fragment of a letter from 44 Linden Gardens, Bayswater 1910, Pankhurst file 7, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, p. 8. [94] ‘If it were not for the children, I would take an overdose of chloroform’, said by a respectable tradeswoman after twelve years of marriage. Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage, and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman, 1897, p. 131, and throughout. See also, Lucy Bland (1995), Banishing the Beast: English feminism and sexual morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin). [95] Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 262. [96] The young Beatrice Potter, who shared Eleanor’s sense of guilt and her hysterical symptoms—chronic sleeplessness, anorexia, compulsive overwork, and relentless self‐criticism—like Eleanor, used work to stamp out feelings of personal ambition, sexual love, even the desire for happiness as she grappled with her love for Joseph Chamberlain. Potter described how the ‘inner struggle’ between the intellectual and the sensual brought forth ‘the nethermost being … vain, grasping, waiting only for physical depression to clutch and strangle the Ego. Such a being leads direct to suicide for life with it is unbearable’. MacKenzie & MacKenzie (Eds) The Dairies of Beatrice Webb, Volume One, p. 189, pp. 50, 193. Karl Marx, like the doctors, attributed Eleanor’s breakdowns and anorexia to hysteria, and virginal abstinence, described as a problem of spinsters in the Avelings’ pamphlet, ‘The Woman Question’ (1886), p. 9: ‘How is it that our sisters bear upon their brows this stamp of lost instincts, stifled affections, a nature in part murdered?’ [97] The Daughters of Karl Marx, p. xxxi. [98] Translator’s Preface in Gustave Flaubert (1886) Madame Bovary, translated by Eleanor Marx (London: Vizetelly & Co.), p. xix. ‘Disappointed love’ was a euphemism for frustrated sexual desire. Eleanor had attempted suicide at least once before 1898, and she talked of suicide when her acting ambition was disappointed, according to her friend Marian Comyn, My Recollections of Karl Marx, p. 167. One third of suicides in London at the turn of the century were women’s. Women’s preferred method was drowning, men’s hanging. Both Olive Schreiner and Beatrice Potter had suicidal feelings (note 97); Amy Levy, novelist and friend of Eleanor, committed suicide; Kapp’s footnotes mention the suicides of several other contemporary artists and actresses. Aveling was condemned by all those who paid tribute to Eleanor at her cremation and memorial. He died three months later of kidney disease. Eleanor had loved him with an ‘obstinate’ love, as one exasperated admirer put it. Her own explanation was that he was more intelligent than she was, they understood one another and that he made her feel feminine: ‘I was irresistibly drawn to him … Our tastes were much the same … We agreed on Socialism. We both loved the theatre … We could work together effectively’. Kapp, Crowded Years, p. 204 [99] ‘Infinite variety’ is of course Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Compare Beatrice Webb, ‘Women and the Factory Acts’, Fabian Tract no. 67, February 1896, S. Alexander (Ed.) (2001) Women’s Source Library, vol. V11, Women’s Fabian Texts (London: Routledge), pp. 17–30 with the Avelings’ ‘The Factory Hell’ (1886); both have echoes of her father’s discussion of the factory movement in the first volume of Capital (1866). ‘Making Sense of Identity’, Amartya Sen (2006) Identity and Violence: the illusion of destiny (London: Penguin), pp.18–39 accompanied me on the final edit of this article. [100] Marx & Aveling, ‘The Woman Question’, p. 8. [101] Shelley, famously, was no monogomist. [102] Virginia Woolf (1938, 1977 edn) Three Guineas (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 157, 162, 203–204. On Woolf’s impatience with ‘fictitious sympathy’ without shared unconscious emotions, Introduction, Margaret Llewelyn Davies (Ed.) (1931) Life as We Have Known It, by Co‐operative Working Women (London: Virago, 1977), p. xxx. [103] See entries on femininity, the feminine position and ambivalence in Hinshelwood, The Kleinian Dictionary. [104] Judith Shklar (1990) The Faces of Injustice (New Haven and London, Yale University Press), ch. 2. Jane Lewis’s succinct study of the limits of welfare legislation for women is still useful, (1980) The Politics of Motherhood (London: Croom Helm), Introduction and Conclusion. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSally Alexander Sally Alexander teaches in the Department of History, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. She is an editor of History Workshop Journal. ‘Skin of the Day’, women’s subjectivity in London between the wars is to be published by Yale in 2008.