Eleanor Marx: A Life

Rachel Holmes

Bloomsbury India

528 pages, Rs. 699

Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, was a pioneering feminist and an exceptional woman, who first translated Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and the plays of Henrik Ibsen into English. She worked tirelessly as her father’s personal secretary and researcher, and later edited many of his key political works. She was also the first woman to lead various British trade unions. 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.