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c o n t r i b u t o r s This month’s pulpit is written by Henry Jeffreys. He is wine columnist for The Lady and head of publicity at Oneworld Publications. Rosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL. Her most recent book is Victorian Bloomsbury (2012). Mira Bar-Hillel is property and planning correspondent of the Evening Standard. Jonathan Beckman’s first book, How to Ruin a Queen, about the Diamond Necklace Affair, will be published by John Murray next month. Daniel Beer is a historian of modern Russia at Royal Holloway. He is writing a book about exile to Siberia before 1917. David Bodanis’s history of the Ten Commandments will be published by Bloomsbury later this year. Frank Brinkley is CEA of Literary Review. Kathleen Burk is the author of Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 and co-author (with Alec Cairncross) of ‘Goodbye, Great Britain’: The 1976 IMF Crisis. Paul Cartledge is A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Clare College, Cambridge. David Cesarani is completing a book on the fate of the Jews from 1933 to 1949 for Macmillan. Oliver Dennis is a violin teacher living in Melbourne. His edition of Lesbia Harford’s poems is due out in September. Brian Dillon’s most recent books are Objects in This Mirror: Essays and Ruin Lust. Suzi Feay recently made a programme for Radio 4 on literary estates. Ophelia Field is the author of The Kit-Cat Club and is working on a collection of essays. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. Tom Fort’s most recent book is The A303. Richard Fortey is a palaeontologist and Emeritus Research Associate at the Natural History Museum. His latest book is Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time Has Left Behind (HarperCollins). John Gray’s most recent book is The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Penguin). Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton and the author of How to Read Hitler (2014). John Gribbin is a visiting fellow in astronomy at the university of Sussex and author of Science: A History (Penguin). Alexandra Harris is the author of Romantic Moderns. Her book about English weather and the arts will be published next year. Nick Hayes is an illustrator, political cartoonist and graphic novelist. His next book, a biography of Woody Guthrie, will be published by Jonathan Cape in September. Sudhir Hazareesingh is a Fellow in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford. His next book, How The French Think, will be published by Penguin in 2015. Simon Heffer’s High Minds is available from all fine booksellers. He is researching a sequel, covering the years 1880 to 1914. Ted Hodgkinson is a literature adviser at the British Council. Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent. His recent books include Modernism and Style. Kevin Jackson’s monograph on Nosferatu was published in November. Peter Jones’s Veni Vidi Vici (Atlantic Books) is published in paperback this month. Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic at SOAS. His books include The Court of the Caliphs: When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World. Anthony Kenny has been Master of Balliol College and President of the British Academy. His most recent book is OUP’s New History of Western Philosophy. Adam LeBor is the author of Milosevic: A Biography. The Geneva Option, his latest thriller, is published by Telegram. Jeremy Lewis is currently at work on a biography of David Astor. Toby Lichtig is fiction in translation editor of the TLS. Leanda de Lisle’s Tudor: The Family Story (1437-1603) is out in paperback next month. Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press). Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance: Journeys beneath a Nuclear Sky is published by Chatto. Allan Massie’s most recent novel is Cold Winter in Bordeaux (Quartet). Jonathan Miles is the author of the novels Dear American Airlines and Want Not. Wendy Moore’s latest book, How to Create the Perfect Wife, is now available in paperback. Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France is out in August. Jan Morris’s absolutely final book, the caprice Ciao, Carpaccio!, is published later this year. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia). Alex Preston’s third novel, In Love and War, will be published by Faber in July. Frederic Raphael’s sixth volume of notebooks, There and Then, was published by Carcanet last year. Chris Riddell won the 2013 Costa Children’s Book Award. Barney Ronay is senior sports writer for The Guardian, purveyor of contemporary conventional sporting perspective and a tennis lover. Ian Sansom’s most recent book is The Norfolk Mystery (HarperCollins). A S H Smyth is a freelance writer and a trooper in the Honourable Artillery Company. He served in Helmand and Kabul in 2013. Norman Stone’s most recent book is World War Two: A Short History (Penguin). John Sutherland’s most recent books include Jumbo and How to Be Well Read. Frances Wilson is writing a book about Thomas De Quincey. Literary Review | m a y 2 0 1 4 4
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b i o g r a p h y r o s emary a s h t on Her Father ’s Daughter Eleanor Marx: A Life By Rachel Holmes (Bloomsbury 508pp £25) When Karl Marx’s youngest daughter died on 31 March 1898 at the age of 43, she had accomplished and suffered enough in her relatively short life to fill several volumes. Rachel Holmes’s new life is a substantial one, written with brio and an appropriate sense of the public and private drama that accompanied Eleanor almost daily. It begins with her birth in Soho to parents who were extraordinary in many ways, including their hand-to-mouth existence despite middle-class origins, and ends with her miserable death in a small house in Jews Walk, Sydenham, near the re-erected Crystal Palace, as the unhappy partner of the fraudster Edward Aveling. The ‘global citizen’, as her father laughingly – and presciently – called Eleanor in a letter announcing her birth in January 1855, was the Marxes’ sixth child and the youngest to survive. The cramped rooms in Dean Street were home to two older daughters, Jenny (named after her mother) and Laura, aged 11 and 10, and 7-yearold Edgar, who died of tuberculosis soon after Eleanor’s birth. Another son had died of meningitis in 1850, just before his first birthday. Eleanor and her older sisters grew up in a household that was always in debt, with Karl sometimes unable to buy food or necessary medicines, but in which there was the stimulus of multilingual conversation and visits from political exiles who had, like Karl and Jenny Marx, pitched up in relatively liberal Britain after the failed revolutions across Europe in 1848 drove them from Paris, Brussels and other European cities. The Marx family spoke in French ( Jenny and Laura having been born in Paris and Brussels), German and English. Marx and his friend and correspondent Friedrich Engels – for many years domiciled in Manchester, from where he sent regular financial handouts to save his friend’s family from starvation – wrote their wonderfully expressive letters in a polyglot mix, the base language being German, with phrases in French and quotations from Shakespeare adorning almost every page. When Eleanor, in her speeches and writings as an adult, talked of ‘we English’, she did so from the highly unusual perspective of a child of immigrants who became intimately involved in British political life. All three daughters were striking and independent-minded. Their parents combined a sort of anti-Mrs Grundy Bohemianism with a sense that daughters being Marx: class act brought up in England ought to observe some of the conventions of the host society. Dances were put on for the older girls when they reached their later teens (by which time the Marxes were living in larger accommodation in north London) and when Laura was to marry Paul Lafargue, a French doctor and socialist, her father rather amusingly asked Engels to find out from a trusted English colleague, the radical lawyer Ernest Jones, how he and his wife should explain to their neighbours that the marriage would not take place in a church. Jones suggested that they describe the register office as a necessary compromise because Laura was Protestant and Paul Catholic. Less amusingly, Karl wrote to Lafargue expressing remorse and resentment that he had ‘sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle’. He did not regret it, but he was nonetheless opposed to the marriage, wishing to ‘save my daughter from the reefs upon which her mother’s life has been wrecked’. As it happened, among the many people the great political thinker attracted to his home, it was three French radicals – all naturally impecunious and reckless – with whom the Marx daughters fell in love. Laura married Lafargue despite parental unhappiness, Jenny did likewise with Charles Longuet, and Eleanor fell for a much older activist called Hippolyte-Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray. The two older girls followed in their mother’s footsteps, being ‘clever, capable, and talented women enchanted by charming, likeable Bluebeards who lassoed their desires with babies, domestic drudgery and censorious in-laws’, as Holmes pithily puts it. Both were unhappy. When Eleanor finally decided that she had no future with Lissagaray, she fared even worse, falling into the arms of Aveling, an English socialist and all-round bad egg. Henry Hyndman, their colleague in English socialist circles, marvelled at Aveling’s attraction for women: ‘Ugly and repulsive to some extent, as he looked, he needed but half an hour’s start of the handsomest man in London.’ Other sorrowful friends included George Bernard Shaw, from whom Aveling borrowed money he had no intention of paying back (as he did from all Eleanor’s friends). And that’s not to mention stealing from her, fraudulently ensuring that he would benefit from her will after she discovered he had recently married an actress using a pseudonym and stooping to blackmail over a troubling Marx family secret. Eleanor refused to listen to friends who warned her against Aveling. None could persuade her: not the writer Olive Schreiner, William Morris’s daughter May, Hyndman’s wife – good confidantes who compensated somewhat for the death of her mother in 1881, the removal of her sisters to France and, in the case of young Jenny, m a y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 5

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c o n t r i b u t o r s

This month’s pulpit is written by Henry Jeffreys. He is wine columnist for The Lady and head of publicity at Oneworld Publications. Rosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL. Her most recent book is Victorian Bloomsbury (2012). Mira Bar-Hillel is property and planning correspondent of the Evening Standard. Jonathan Beckman’s first book, How to Ruin a Queen, about the Diamond Necklace Affair, will be published by John Murray next month. Daniel Beer is a historian of modern Russia at Royal Holloway. He is writing a book about exile to Siberia before 1917. David Bodanis’s history of the Ten Commandments will be published by Bloomsbury later this year. Frank Brinkley is CEA of Literary Review. Kathleen Burk is the author of Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 and co-author (with Alec Cairncross) of ‘Goodbye, Great Britain’: The 1976 IMF Crisis. Paul Cartledge is A G Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Clare College, Cambridge. David Cesarani is completing a book on the fate of the Jews from 1933 to 1949 for Macmillan. Oliver Dennis is a violin teacher living in Melbourne. His edition of Lesbia Harford’s poems is due out in September. Brian Dillon’s most recent books are Objects in This Mirror: Essays and Ruin Lust. Suzi Feay recently made a programme for Radio 4 on literary estates. Ophelia Field is the author of The Kit-Cat Club and is working on a collection of essays. Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer. Tom Fort’s most recent book is The A303. Richard Fortey is a palaeontologist and Emeritus Research Associate at the Natural History Museum. His latest book is Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time Has Left Behind (HarperCollins). John Gray’s most recent book is The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Penguin).

Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton and the author of How to Read Hitler (2014). John Gribbin is a visiting fellow in astronomy at the university of Sussex and author of Science: A History (Penguin). Alexandra Harris is the author of Romantic Moderns. Her book about English weather and the arts will be published next year. Nick Hayes is an illustrator, political cartoonist and graphic novelist. His next book, a biography of Woody Guthrie, will be published by Jonathan Cape in September. Sudhir Hazareesingh is a Fellow in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford. His next book, How The French Think, will be published by Penguin in 2015. Simon Heffer’s High Minds is available from all fine booksellers. He is researching a sequel, covering the years 1880 to 1914. Ted Hodgkinson is a literature adviser at the British Council. Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent. His recent books include Modernism and Style. Kevin Jackson’s monograph on Nosferatu was published in November. Peter Jones’s Veni Vidi Vici (Atlantic Books) is published in paperback this month. Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic at SOAS. His books include The Court of the Caliphs: When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World. Anthony Kenny has been Master of Balliol College and President of the British Academy. His most recent book is OUP’s New History of Western Philosophy. Adam LeBor is the author of Milosevic: A Biography. The Geneva Option, his latest thriller, is published by Telegram.

Jeremy Lewis is currently at work on a biography of David Astor. Toby Lichtig is fiction in translation editor of the TLS. Leanda de Lisle’s Tudor: The Family Story (1437-1603) is out in paperback next month. Jessica Mann’s latest book is Dead Woman Walking (The Cornovia Press). Patrick Marnham’s Snake Dance: Journeys beneath a Nuclear Sky is published by Chatto. Allan Massie’s most recent novel is Cold Winter in Bordeaux (Quartet). Jonathan Miles is the author of the novels Dear American Airlines and Want Not. Wendy Moore’s latest book, How to Create the Perfect Wife, is now available in paperback. Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France is out in August. Jan Morris’s absolutely final book, the caprice Ciao, Carpaccio!, is published later this year. Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia). Alex Preston’s third novel, In Love and War, will be published by Faber in July. Frederic Raphael’s sixth volume of notebooks, There and Then, was published by Carcanet last year. Chris Riddell won the 2013 Costa Children’s Book Award. Barney Ronay is senior sports writer for The Guardian, purveyor of contemporary conventional sporting perspective and a tennis lover. Ian Sansom’s most recent book is The Norfolk Mystery (HarperCollins). A S H Smyth is a freelance writer and a trooper in the Honourable Artillery Company. He served in Helmand and Kabul in 2013. Norman Stone’s most recent book is World War Two: A Short History (Penguin). John Sutherland’s most recent books include Jumbo and How to Be Well Read. Frances Wilson is writing a book about Thomas De Quincey.

Literary Review | m a y 2 0 1 4 4

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