“THE MAN who could not hear a tale of distress without attempting to relieve it can now brag of abetting acts that endanger the lives of innocent women and children,” Eleanor Marx, self-proclaimed “Fenian Sister” wrote in her text the Irish Dynamiters in 1884. 

The context was specific: her writing, as part of her activism, on the imprisonment and oppression of those fighting for Irish freedom. And yet this quotation, as Eleanor Marx’s work broadly, resonates with our moment in a poignant way. 

Eleanor Marx, Karl and Jenny Marx’s youngest daughter (1855-98) was brought back into our intellectual and political landscapes by Rachel Holmes’s extraordinary biography, Eleanor Marx, A Life (Bloomsbury, 2015). Holmes’s re-reading of her life and times returned to us Eleanor Marx as the foremother of socialism — feminism. Internationalist, trade unionist, editor and multilingual translator of her father’s archive, she co-founded Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s first organised socialist party, alongside William Morris, and HM Hyndman.