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Who is Eleanor Marx?

The intellectual marvel Jenny Julia Eleanor “Tussy” Marx (1855-1898), daughter of Karl Marx, became friends with George Moore in the mid 1880s. He helped arrange her translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (London: Vizetelly, 1886) while she fed his passion for the plays of Henrik Ibsen and a new literary theater.

George modeled his play The Strike and Arlingford (1893) in part on Eleanor’s troubled relationship with Edward Aveling (1849-1898) that ended with her suicide. True to his aesthetic lodestare, George inserted a note in the book:

“In my own conception of my play the labour dispute is an externality to which I attach litle importance. What I applied myself to in the composition of ‘The Strike at Arlingford’ was the development of a moral idea. I leave the play itself to explain this.”