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摘要
摘要
The extraordinary and dramatic biography of the first modern feminist, who spent her entire life fighting for the principle of equality ' Gripping ... Most lives would be overshadowed by such a melodramatic end. But Marx's life was so much more than a murder mystery, as Rachel Holmes's gripping and vividly told biography demonstrates' Sunday Times ' Superb ... The story of this remarkable life is so well told, with a rare combination of pace, verve and scholarship' Jeanette Winterson, Daily Telegraph Unrestrained by convention, lion-hearted and free, Eleanor Marx (1855-98) was an exceptional woman. Hers was the first English translation of Flaubert's Mme Bovary . She pioneered the theatre of Henrik Ibsen . She was the first woman to lead the British dock workers' and gas workers' trades unions. For years she worked tirelessly for her father, Karl Marx, as personal secretary and researcher. Later she edited many of his key political works, and laid the foundations for his biography. But foremost among her achievements was her pioneering feminism. For her, sexual equality was a necessary precondition for a just society. Drawing strength from her family and their wide circle, including Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknecht, Eleanor Marx set out into the world to make a difference - her favourite motto: 'Go ahead!' With her closest friends - among them, Olive Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw, Will Thorne and William Morris - she was at the epicentre of British socialism. She was also the only Marx to claim her Jewishness. But her life contained a deep sadness: she loved a faithless and dishonest man, the academic, actor and would-be playwright Edward Aveling. Yet despite the unhappiness he brought her, Eleanor Marx never wavered in her political life, ceaselessly campaigning and organising until her untimely end, which - with its letters, legacies, secrets and hidden paternity - reads in part like a novel by Wilkie Collins, and in part like the modern tragedy it was. Rachel Holmes has gone back to original sources to tell the story of the woman who did more than any other to transform British politics in the nineteenth century, who was unafraid to live her contradictions.
著者加注
Rachel Holmes is the author of The Secret Life of Dr James Barry and The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman . She is co-editor, with Lisa Appignanesi and Susie Orbach, of Fifty Shades of Feminism and co-commissioning editor, with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon, of Sixty-Six Books: Twenty-First Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible . She lives in Gloucestershire.
评论 (4)
Guardian 书评
You could write a whole book about good women who had their lives ruined by bad men. Katharine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, just about anyone and Ernest Hemingway. And then there's Eleanor Marx, the clever, large-souled daughter of Karl, who in 1884 hitched up with Edward Aveling, a man whom everyone agreed was a cad. "A reptile", said George Bernard Shaw. "Ugly and repulsive", volunteered Henry Hyndman, the co-founder of the Social Democratic Federation under whose auspices the young couple first met. It wasn't just Aveling's shifty looks, or the fact that he fiddled his expenses, nor even his habit of shouting when a quiet word would do. No, he cheated on the divine Miss M in ways that border on the spectacular. He sponged off her reputation and her meagre funds, and then married his mistress behind her back. As a final insult, suggests Rachel Holmes in this passionately partisan biography, he may even have murdered her. The murder accusation has been around for over a 100 years - socialists love to gossip and there were plenty of whispers circulating within weeks of Eleanor Marx's funeral, which was attended by a large crowd of colleagues from the Labour and trades union movements. But whether or not there is anything to be read into the fact that Aveling's initials were on the prescription for the prussic acid that somehow ended up inside 43-year-old Eleanor on 31 March 1898 is a moot point. It wasn't, after all, her first attempt at suicide, although Holmes rather glosses over the fact that 10 years earlier she had swallowed a killer dose of opium - at least according to her good friend Havelock Ellis. Nor is there anything made of the fact that Eleanor's elder sister Laura eventually killed herself too, which rather suggests that there was a twist of sadness running through the Marx girls long before life had its way with them. Perhaps, though, it doesn't matter. For Holmes the "murder" is as much metaphorical as literal. In her narrative Aveling becomes the container of all the patriarchal attitudes that ultimately made Eleanor's life unbearable. Too good for the wicked world which she had tried so hard to save, Marx was a dead woman walking. In recent years biography has increasingly concerned itself with historical heroines who speak to the post-feminist moment. That's why there have been so many books about actresses, courtesans and women with impeccable dress sense campaigning for the right to divorce. Against this well-heeled backdrop Eleanor Marx has always seemed hopelessly out of date, with her badly done hair, pince-nez glasses and commitment to collective rather than individual rights. It is telling that the last major biography, a two-volume show-stopper from Yvonne Kapp, came out 40 years ago. But, Holmes argues persuasively, now the world is getting interested in Marx, pere et fille, all over again. As the global economy stutters, the gap between rich and poor widens and revolution works its way through the Arab world, more and more people are once again reading Das Kapital, the 1867 masterwork that Marx wrote while little "Tussy" - Eleanor's lifelong nickname - played at his feet. More than this, Holmes contends, there is a renewed hunger to find out what happened next. Karl may have provided the theory for social revolution, but it was Eleanor who took it out into the world and tried to make it work. She was a tireless campaigner, founding three trade unions and the Socialist League. But most importantly for Holmes, Eleanor Marx wrested feminism away from its narrow, bourgeois suffrage and property-rights agenda and insisted on trying to make it a properly socialist enterprise. We are still living with the fallout today. Such a heroine deserves a fairytale childhood, and this is exactly what Holmes' provides her with in this conventionally structured biography. There are three surviving Marx children, all girls, and Tussy is the youngest by almost a decade. Her mother, Jenny, is beautiful and progressive with a prosperous background, housekeeper Helene Demuth is a homely "second mother", and Friedrich Engels - the Angel - is a kindly uncle with bottomless pockets from which he subs the shabby Marx family so that they may continue with their vitally important work. The girls grow up in London in a polyglot of European languages and strenuous intellectual endeavour, although it is "Tussy" who is the real prodigy. Deprived of a formal education when the money runs out, she is given something even better, the run of her father's great mind. "Tussy is me," declared Karl Marx triumphantly, a remark that Holmes quotes with apparent delight. It is, then, all very gemutlich. Yet in 2011 Mary Gabriel's magisterial Love and Capital showed us the Marx family riven with tensions, struggles and secrets as well as all the good stuff. What about, for instance, the probable fact that Marx had an affair with the housekeeper Demuth, which resulted in a son whom he refused to recognise? Holmes withholds this well-known material until near the end of her book, using it as a mystery to drive her narrative forward. Fair enough, but it does mean that Eleanor's rocky self-esteem and constitutional "sore heart" appears to come from nowhere in particular. Instead of the confident, cheery girl you might have expected to blossom in the family atmosphere that Holmes describes, Tussy toys with eating disorders and terrible men. For her first lover she picked the rackety French socialist Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, who was twice her age. Heartless and womanising, "Lissa" led the girl a merry dance, from which she emerged broken and anorexic. It was at this point that she pitched into a career of hyperactive goodness, as if desperate to fix things, people and situations that she knew at heart to be very bad. Her life of exemplary service started as secretary to her father, and then moved outwards into organising and campaigning for the growing Labour movement. She walked endlessly from meeting to meeting, giving so many speeches that her voice was reduced to a rasp, and writing political essays for which she would never get paid. Almost trying to kill herself, in other words, through helping others. In the process, though, she did an awful lot of good and Holmes is excellent on the how and why of all that. Not only is the story of British socialism messy to tell, it is also difficult to make sing. But Holmes throws her ebullient prose at all those committee meetings, managing to make us see why each speech, each pamphlet, and each internecine quarrel actually matters in the long run. The result is a biography that, paradoxically, is most illuminating when it leaves the world of bungled private lives behind and steps out smartly on to the public stage. Kathryn Hughes, professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia, is writing a book about famous Victorians' body parts. To order Eleanor Marx for pounds 19.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Kathryn Hughes Caption: Captions: 'A career of hyperactive goodness' . . . Eleanor 'Tussy' Marx The murder accusation has been around for over a 100 years - socialists love to gossip and there were plenty of whispers circulating within weeks of [Eleanor Marx]'s funeral, which was attended by a large crowd of colleagues from the Labour and trades union movements. But whether or not there is anything to be read into the fact that [Edward Aveling]'s initials were on the prescription for the prussic acid that somehow ended up inside 43-year-old Eleanor on 31 March 1898 is a moot point. It wasn't, after all, her first attempt at suicide, although [Rachel Holmes] rather glosses over the fact that 10 years earlier she had swallowed a killer dose of opium - at least according to her good friend Havelock Ellis. Nor is there anything made of the fact that Eleanor's elder sister Laura eventually killed herself too, which rather suggests that there was a twist of sadness running through the Marx girls long before life had its way with them. Perhaps, though, it doesn't matter. For Holmes the "murder" is as much metaphorical as literal. In her narrative Aveling becomes the container of all the patriarchal attitudes that ultimately made Eleanor's life unbearable. Too good for the wicked world which she had tried so hard to save, Marx was a dead woman walking. Such a heroine deserves a fairytale childhood, and this is exactly what Holmes' provides her with in this conventionally structured biography. There are three surviving Marx children, all girls, and Tussy is the youngest by almost a decade. Her mother, Jenny, is beautiful and progressive with a prosperous background, housekeeper Helene Demuth is a homely "second mother", and Friedrich Engels - the Angel - is a kindly uncle with bottomless pockets from which he subs the shabby Marx family so that they may continue with their vitally important work. The girls grow up in London in a polyglot of European languages and strenuous intellectual endeavour, although it is "Tussy" who is the real prodigy. Deprived of a formal education when the money runs out, she is given something even better, the run of her father's great mind. "Tussy is me," declared Karl Marx triumphantly, a remark that Holmes quotes with apparent delight. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus评论
The extraordinary life of Karl Marx's feisty feminist youngest daughter told with passionate sympathy and conviction.The relationship between her committed socialist parents forms the key to the vivacious life of Eleanor "Tussy" Marx (1855-1898), as portrayed chronologically by British writer Holmes (African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus, 2007, etc.). Exiled from Germany and France after their participation in the failed democratic revolutions convulsing Europe in 1848, the Marxes relocated to London. With only three surviving daughters, they scraped by largely thanks to colleague Frederick Engels' generous subsidies. While the two elder daughters enjoyed some formal education, Tussy was mostly schooled at her parents' knees, imbued with their firebrand ideals of collectivism and internationalism and their advocacy for the proletariat and the principles of the International Workingmen's Association, and she aided her beloved father in his research for his opus Capital at the Reading Room in the British Museum. Having watched her mother's intelligence and ambition subsumed by her father's work, then seeing her two older married sisters shackled by motherhood and household drudgery, Tussy chose free love with talented older men and an autonomous life earning her own wages as a tutor, translator and writer. Indeed, writes Holmes in this consistently illuminating biography, she was the "apple of [her father's] eye" and later became his executor. She channeled her high spirits first into the theater (she and her father had recited Shakespeare together as a way for him to learn English), translated Madame Bovary into English, among other works, and eventually set up house in London with the "reptilian" fellow actor and intellectual Edward Aveling, who never married her despite his 14-year promises. Holmes is absolutely outraged by Aveling's betrayal and Tussy's horrifying, untimely deatha tragic tale of a brilliant light eclipsed by the stifling patriarchy of her age. A full-fleshed, thrilling portrait, troubling and full of family secrets. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
图书评论的纽约评论
THREE WOMEN POSSESSED of extraordinary political talent loved men who were unworthy of them: Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman and Eleanor Marx. The first two survived these debilitating attachments, the third did not. At the age of 43, upon learning that her common law husband of 14 years had secretly married a 22-year-old actress, Eleanor took poison and died. Had her father, Karl Marx, been alive he would have been not only distressed by her death but, I think, dismayed that a daughter of his could not surmount this level of betrayal, for the sake of international socialism if nothing else. Karl and Jenny Marx were married in 1843. At the time, Marx was already a law student turned radical journalist, his writings and his political activity contributing to the turbulent times that would soon explode into the 1848 revolutions that shook but did not topple the monarchies of Europe. As his work was forever drawing the attention of hostile governments everywhere, Marx and his wife were often on the move, expelled from or fleeing one country or another - Germany, France, Belgium - usually a minute before Karl was about to be arrested. After the publication of "The Communist Manifesto" in 1848, life on the European continent became truly perilous for the Marxes, and the following year they moved to London. There they lived, for the rest of their lives in a combined state of immigrant want and bohemian intellectualism, continually bailed out by Marx's devoted collaborator, the wealthy Friedrich Engels. As a grown woman, Eleanor, bent on indicting capitalism, wrote that in London the family endured "years of horrible poverty, of bitter suffering - such suffering as can only be known to the penniless stranger in a strange land." This was true, but it was also true that together the family read Shakespeare, took long walks, listened to music, had Sunday open houses to which every revolutionary visitor or exile in London came, and talked politics nonstop. For better and for worse, it was a life of physical hardship made vibrant by the sense of mission that flowed from the Great Man who sat writing "Das Kapital" at the kitchen table for some 12 years. Between 1844 and 1855, Jenny Marx bore seven children, only three of whom lived into adulthood: Jennychen, Laura and Eleanor. All three daughters grew up "living and breathing historical materialism," as Rachel Holmes tells us in her new biography, "Eleanor Marx," but none breathed it in more deeply than this youngest child. When she was a teenager her mother referred to her as "eine Politikerin von top to bottom"; to which her father added that his other two children were like him, but Eleanor was him. And indeed, while the two elder sisters married "likable, liberal Bluebeards who lassoed their desire with babies," Eleanor grew up to become a major player in the rise of British socialism, living her life in an unbroken extension of the one into which she had been born. She was a lovely girl - her eyes dark and expressive, her hair a mop of black curls - and from earliest childhood smart, passionate, argumentative. Although in love with literature and languages, music and theater, it was always radical politics that set her on fire. Socialism ran in her veins and glowed on her skin. Before she was 20 she was arguing that the English worker movement was at a standstill, something had to be done, and she was aching to do it. The first British socialist organization (called the Democratic Federation) was formed in 1881. When it was re-formed in 1884 as the Social Democratic Federation, Eleanor was among its initiating members. Until her death 17 years later, she lectured and wrote on behalf of socialism; helped organize strikes, rallies, election campaigns; and played a role in the internecine struggles that went on in every socialist group to which she belonged. Often she was perceived as a highhanded steamroller who acted as though socialism was her private property (after all, she was her father's daughter, wasn't she?), but just as often it was clear that the oppressed of the earth were very real to her - "Sometimes I wonder how one can go on living with all this suffering around" - and her honest belief in the virtue of socialism ran deep. In a letter she wrote in 1885, while arranging for a Christmas festival for children, she said, "We cannot too soon make children understand that Socialism means happiness." When she was 27 years old, Eleanor met Edward Aveling - freethinker, biology teacher, disciple of Darwin - in the British Museum's Reading Room. They began living together, and she drew him into her innermost political circles. Soon they were a power couple, with Aveling on the podium as often as Eleanor. It was her extraordinary energy that almost invariably led the intellectual way, but they were, in fact, a remarkably successful team. If it was she who dreamed up subject after subject for them to speak, write or organize around, Aveling was always ready to fall in with her suggestions, and he reveled in all that made Eleanor worthwhile. Her intellectual passion, her political high-mindedness, her steadfast devotion to the Cause - for all this he loved her. Yet he told her that he couldn't marry her because he was already married and lied that he couldn't get a divorce. (He later concealed the fact of his wife's death.) Aveling was considered an excellent speaker and a reliable socialist, but he was also seen - and this quite early - as a man of little moral worth. Not only was he an open womanizer, but whenever he took financial control of a project (as he often did) no one could balance the books. He hungered for good clothes, expensive restaurants, cabs and theater tickets, and was indifferent as to how those desires were satisfied. "The best was good enough for him," sneered one comrade, "at no matter whose expense." The person at whose expense Aveling generally made himself comfortable was, of course, Eleanor. Besotted throughout her time with him, she was yet often miserable. Aveling was selfish, nasty, petty, and three times out of five not there when she needed him; a hypochondriac of some dimension, he was forever going off to take "the cure" somewhere (really to rendezvous with other women), leaving Eleanor alone for weeks on end. As the years went on, the discrepancy between a crowded public life and a lonely personal one weighed ever more heavily on her. YET SHE COULDN'T give him up. Why? Let me hazard a guess. Like Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman before her, Eleanor suffered the burden of occupying a singular position, that of a powerful woman in an overwhelmingly male world where, to put it bluntly, she was experienced as a freak: the denatured brilliant exception who is neither fish nor fowl. Each of these women was more alone than any of their male comrades could ever be. The men whom they loved, insufficient as they were - Rosa's Leo Jogiches was a sociopath, Emma's Ben Reitman a satyr and Aveling, an exploiter of the first order - were genuinely respectful of the brilliance of mind and spirit with which these valiant women were endowed. Mad, vain, selfish as the men were, in their company the women felt more than cherished or admired, they felt known. For this, they could not easily free themselves of the humiliations inherent in relationships that in all instances were degrading, and in one fatal. Need anything more be said to justify 200 years of struggle to establish women on something that resembles a level playing field? Rachel Holmes's biography of Eleanor Marx is probably more hagiographic than it should be - its opening line is "Eleanor Marx changed the world" - but it captures vividly the drama of a woman with a hunger for the world who did her damnedest to live life on the largest terms possible, and to a very considerable degree succeeded.
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Starred Review. In this first biography of Eleanor Marx (1855-98) since Yvonne Kapp's 1976 two-volume Eleanor Marx, Holmes (The Hottentot Venus) begins by declaring the daughter of Karl Marx the "foremother of socialist feminism" and declaring that, "not since Mary Wollstonecraft has any woman made such a profound, progressive contribution to English political thought." While readers may not agree with every point the author makes, one can't help but be carried along by Holmes's explicitly feminist narrative in this engaging and suspense-filled volume documenting the younger Marx's personal and political life. There is never a dull moment as the book moves from her early family life and her education at the feet of Marx and Friedrich Engels; an early career as her father's secretary and researcher at the British Museum; her work as a translator, educator, and advocate for new literature and theatre, and as a socialist agitator and trade union leader; and her intellectual and ultimately tragic romantic partnership with Edward Aveling. VERDICT Readers of biography generally, as well as those with an interest in the history of 19th-century political life, the development of British socialism and trade unionism, Marxism, 19th-century literary life, and feminism will all find something in this satisfying and original biography.-Jessica Moran, National Lib. New Zealand, Wellington (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.