Eleanor Marx: A Book Party & Author Reception

Description

“Eleanor Marx changed the world. In the process she revolutionized herself.”
—Preface, Eleanor Marx: A Life

In her biography of Eleanor Marx, Rachel Holmes set out to tell “the story of how she (Eleanor) did it” and she succeeds. She tells the story of a complex person living in a complex time, whose “life was a mass of contradictions….a dramatization of these antagonisms” and “irreducible to either her public or private life.” And so Ms. Holmes tells the story of both. She unapologetically and convincingly demonstrates the significance of Eleanor’s life, a life that “left a colossal, although unacknowledged, legacy for future generations.”

Join the author, Rachel Holmes, and explore the life of this “revolutionary woman writer, revolutionary woman, and revolutionary”, who, among much else, created the political philosophy of socialist-feminism in 1886, “The Women Question: From a Socialist Point of View.”

Rachel Holmes is the author of Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury, May 2014), serialized on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and rated one of the best reads of 2014 by The Telegraph. Holmes is also the author of The Hottentot Venus: The life and death of Saartjie Baartman (Bloomsbury) and The Secret Life of Dr. James Barry (Viking & Tempus Books). In 2013 Holmes co-edited, with Lisa Appignanesi and Susie Orbach, their much-discussed Fifty Shades of Feminism (Virago). She was co-commissioning editor of Sixty Six Books: 21st Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible (Oberon, 2011) with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon.

As an academic, Holmes has held Lectureships at the University of London and the University of Sussex and was a visiting fellow at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Holmes piloted the rst Palestine Writing Workshop established by the Palestine Festival of Literature (PALFEST) in 2009 and was Writer in Residence and a regular tutor on the program for four years. She has taught courses for the Arvon Foundation and was a tutor on the West Dean Creative Writing MA awarded by Sussex University. She serves and has served on various boards, including Oxfam GB and English PEN.