BOOKS
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"As a young girl, 'X' fought bitterly with the father she alternately
worshipped and resented, and to whose library she owed her freedom
from the ignorance to which most women of her time were condemned.
"She married at about thirty, having lost both parents, and
remained childless by choice; her maternal feelings were lavished on
the children of a beloved older sister. She was a socialist and a feminist,
but considered herself primarily a creative artist.
"She suffered periods of severe mental illness, triggered by doubts
about the value of her creative work; her symptoms included self–
starvation, hallucinations, and suicidal depression. Before her final,
successful suicide attempt, she indicated in a note
to
her life compan–
ion that her death was to
be
attributed
to
love."
Beyond these resemblances, Virginia Woolf and Eleanor Marx
now have in common the fact that virtually every scrap of information
relating to either is available for scrutiny by a women's movement that
is bound to read such lives as exemplary. Yet the differences outweigh
what may after all be coincidental similarities of plot. For Woolf was
one of the great creative artists of her age; and Eleanor Marx, though
she was a woman of unusual gifts of mind and spirit, never achieved
her fairly modest dreams. (She believed she could act-"I
can
move an
audience-and that is the chief thing" -and there is a poignant letter
from her sister Jenny, burdened with a loutish husband and five
children, congratulating her on choosing "the only free life a woman
can live-the artistic one.") Her importance, as Yvonne Kapp argues in
a readable, meticulously researched biography, lay in her work for
international socialism and for the British labor movement. Her
numerous translations (notably
Madame Bovary,
and two Ibsen plays)
have been superseded, and her political pamphlets and speeches were
in their nature ephemeral.
As
the women's movement digs for heroines,
it will be interesting to see whether her life and work come to seem of
permanent significance.
It
is easy
to
imagine Virginia Woolf summing her up in a few
finely chiselled paragraphs. No doubt she would fasten on her sadness,
so plainly to be seen in the frontispiece to volume two of Kapp's
biography, and in her letters to her half-brother Freddy Demuth, Karl
Marx's unacknowledged son by his housekeeper. And certainly she
would note her Jewishness. ("I do not like the Jewish voice," Woolf
wrote in her
Diary
after a visit from her sister-in-law. "I do not like the
Jewish laugh ... I think Jewesses are somehow discontented.") And
she would set in her own detached perspective the politics that were
Eleanor Marx's lifeblood. Here is Woolf on a suffrage rally held in
