Eleanor Marx

Social Democratic Federation (SDF) Feminism Marxism United Kingdom 1855–1898 ✕ Suicide by poison

Marx’s youngest daughter, a socialist who worked on the English Capital and in the British labour movement

The youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She became her father’s secretary at sixteen and, after his death, prepared the first English edition of Capital, volume I (1887), under Engels’s supervision. Elected to the executive of the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, she co-founded the Socialist League the next year, helped organise the Gasworkers’ Union and supported the 1889 London Dock Strike. She made the first English translations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and of plays by Ibsen. In 1898, after learning that her partner Edward Aveling had secretly married, she poisoned herself.

Also known as: Eleanor Marx-Aveling · Tussy Marx · Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

Capital and translation

Eleanor grew up in the study where her father was writing the first volume of Capital and became his secretary at about sixteen. After Marx died in 1883, she and Edward Aveling prepared the first English edition of volume I under Engels’s supervision; it appeared in 1887. She also edited Marx’s lectures Value, Price and Profit and Wage Labour and Capital into books, and after Engels died in 1895 she sorted and stored her father’s papers.

As a translator she rendered Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871 into English in 1876 and made the first English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in 1886. She learned Norwegian to translate Ibsen, including An Enemy of Society (1888) and The Lady from the Sea (1890).

The British labour movement

In 1884 she joined Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation and was elected to its executive. The next year, objecting to Hyndman’s autocratic leadership and nationalist tendencies, she co-founded the Socialist League with William Morris and others and wrote a regular column on the international revolutionary movement for its paper, Commonweal. As an advocate of electoral action she ended up in a minority, and her Bloomsbury branch was suspended for running candidates jointly with the SDF.

She helped organise the demonstration of 13 November 1887 that ended in Bloody Sunday, organised the Gasworkers’ Union, and supported the Bryant & May strike of 1888 and the London Dock Strike of 1889. In 1886 she toured the United States with Aveling and Wilhelm Liebknecht to raise money for the German Social Democrats. She attended the founding conference of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 as an observer and rejoined the SDF with Aveling in 1897.

Death

In 1898 Eleanor discovered that the ailing Edward Aveling had secretly married a young actress the year before. On 31 March she sent her maid to the chemist with a note signed with Aveling’s initials asking for chloroform and prussic acid, wrote two brief notes and swallowed the poison. She was forty-three. The inquest returned “suicide while in a state of temporary insanity”, but Aveling was widely reviled among socialists as having driven her to it.

Her ashes were kept by the Social Democratic Federation, the British Socialist Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain in turn until they were buried in Marx’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery in 1956.