Rachel Holmes > Quotes

“Marx and his family arrived in Britain unnoticed. They would change it forever.”
― Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life

“Tussy’s announcement that she was double-brained was coincident with the time of her first conscious memory:   My earliest recollection . . . is when I was about three years old and Mohr . . . was carrying me on his shoulders round our small garden in Grafton Terrace, and putting convolvulus flowers in my brown curls. Mohr was admittedly a splendid horse.29   Putting Marx in harness was a family tradition. Tussy ‘heard tell’ that at Dean Street, Jenny, Laura and her dead brother Edgar would yoke Mohr to chairs which the three of them mounted as their carriage, and make him pull. As the youngest and a later arrival, Tussy got her own mount and his dedicated attention:   Personally – perhaps because I had no sisters of my own age – I preferred Mohr as a riding-horse. Seated on his shoulder holding tight by his great mane of hair, then black, but with a hint of grey, I have had magnificent rides round our little garden and over the fields . . . that surrounded our house at Grafton Terrace.30   Severe whooping cough in the winter of 1858 gave Tussy opportunity to assume dominion of the household: ‘The whole family became my bond slaves and I have heard that as usual in slavery there was general demoralisation.”
― Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life

“By the measure of Trier society, Jenny was a borderline libertine with breathtakingly progressive views. ... For her numerous suitors, Jenny's loveliness and influential, rich father offset her alarming political and intellectual tendencies that, they no doubt believed, would be subdued by the harness of marriage and baby-making. ... However, for one ineligible younger man in Trier, it was precisely that which alarmed other admirers about Jenny's firebrand nature that enticed him. For Karl Marx, her analytical mind, passionate politics, and disregard for social propriety made her a woman in a million.”
― Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life

“In November 1849, he began a long multi-part lecture series entitled, 'What is Bourgeois Property?' Well might he ask, since he had none.”
― Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life