Passionate Lives

Already a fan of her Ninth Street Women, I'm entranced by Mary Gariel's Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Story of a Revolution (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award), though it's SO long and detailed, I may take another year to actually finish it. Normally I buzz through a good book almost too quickly, but this biography requires deep study and much reflective thought after reading a section, then perhaps letting it go for a week or so between.

 

At the moment I'm relishing how Jenny and Karl's brilliant and multilingual daughters were strong women in full support of Marx's/Engels' ideas, marrying men who also wanted to see changes that many of us currently wish for. 

 

This and other reviews focus on how Marx's family paid the price of poverty and ill health, etc., but to me that's missing the point that they really LIVED, true to their values, believing passionately in bettering the lives of working people, loving each other dearly, and fighting for their beliefs in spite of ill health, terrible setbacks, and often tragic endings: 

 

". . . the story of a group of brilliant, combative, exasperating, funny, passionate, and ultimately tragic figures caught up in the revolutions sweeping nineteenth-century Europe." (Mary Gabriel)