Eleanor Marx: The Last Word

Last year the New Yorker published Paul McCartney’s essay on how he came to write “Eleanor Rigby.” It turns out the main character was based on an old woman he knew in his childhood and her name was not Eleanor at all; it may have been Daisy Hawkins but that didn’t work in the scheme with Father MacKenzie (verse two), so he created “Eleanor” from Eleanor Bron, who worked on the Beatles’ Help movie, and “Rigby” after a shop sign he saw in Bristol.

During the first year of the pandemic, I wrote my own song about Eleanor: Eleanor “Tussy” Marx. I found myself reading Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution which tells the epic story of Karl, his wife Jenny von Westphalen and their daughters, Laura, Jenny (Jennychen) and Eleanor. There were others too — Karl and Jenny in fact had seven children but only three survived into adulthood. All three daughters — and their spouses — played a role in the socialist movement, but it was Tussy who was closest to Marx and Engels and the most active politically. More

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