Eleanor Marx's life (1855-1898) is packed with exceptional achievements: she was the first to bring Ibsen to a British public, translating An Enemy of the People and The Woman from Sea ; to translate Flaubert's Madame Bovary (the only translation Nabokov would later recommend); and to lay the foundations for the biography of her father, the great German philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary, Karl Marx. But foremost among her achievements was her strong, pioneering feminism. For Eleanor Marx, sexual equality was a necessary precondition for a just society and social contract; she published the key feminist text, The Woman Question , in 1885 and campaigned on these issues throughout her life. Not since Mary Wollstonecraft had any individual made such a profound contribution to British political thought and action.Drawing strength from her family - Karl and Jennie Marx, and her two sisters and their political activist and communard husbands - and its wide circle of friends, including Friedrich Engels and Wilhelm Liebknect, Eleanor Marx went out into the world from an early age determined to make a difference. Her own friends, among them, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw and Olive Schreiner, were also a great support to her, until the behaviour of her shifty and unfaithful partner, the socialist campaigner, actor and would-be playwright Edward Aveling, began to repel them. Despite her unhappiness, she never stopped campaigning and organising until her untimely end, which . with its letters, legacies, hidden paternity and suicide .

reads in part like a novel by Wilkie Collins or Charles Dickens, and in part like the very modern tragedy it was.Rachel Holmes has gone back to original sources to create a life of the nineteenth-century woman who did more than any other to transform British politics, and who was unafraid to live her contradictions.