The extraordinary and dramatic biography of the first modern feminist, who spent her entire life fighting for the principle of equality

I got to the end of Rachel Holmes's Eleanor Marx and wanted to start all over again. There is so much in it and yet it reads effortlessly. The scholarship that brings the second part of the nineteenth century alive is a feast . and at the centre of it all, the irrepressible daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx, the loving sister, passionate lover, actress, political organiser, fiery speaker, translator and intellect. A giant whose character in all its complexity steps off the page to inspire another generation Susie Orbach A remarkable achievement. With effortless scholarship, Rachel Holmes restores Marx to her proper status as one of the founding figures of twentieth-century revolutionary and feminist thought - her father's daughter and much more. She tells this story with a vividness that rivals the literary writing that was one of Eleanor Marx's greatest passions. I simply couldn't put the book down Jacqueline Rose Rachel Holmes has produced a dazzling account of a woman and her family, an age and a movement, that grips from the first page to the last Gillian Slovo Eleanor Marx is both a challenging and a stimulating subject for a biographer. In this widely researched and passionately written book, Rachel Holmes has found an original way of presenting her. She balances Eleanor's political career, centred in the Reading Room of the British Museum among her Victorian Bloomsbury group colleagues, with her sobriquet, the emotional figure of "Tussy", whose love for Edward Aveling ends in tragedy. It is as if the biographer is conducting string and wind instruments in an orchestra. The result, surprising at first, becomes profoundly satisfying Michael Holroyd

Rachel Holmes is the author of The Secret Life of Dr James Barry and The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman. She is co-editor, with Lisa Appignanesi and Susie Orbach, of Fifty Shades of Feminism and co-commissioning editor, with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon, of Sixty-Six Books, twenty-first century writers speak to the King James Bible. She lives in Gloucestershire.