FICTION IN REVIEW

1 7 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W G R E G J O H N S O N Unlike his more famous and more accomplished close friend Karl Marx, the political scientist, theorist, and revolutionary Friedrich Engels is relatively little known in the United States. Though he was the co-author with Marx of The Communist Manifesto (1848), one of the most celebrated books published in the nineteenth century, and the single author of such influential titles as The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), few people other than academic specialists know his work well, and even fewer are familiar with his personal life. That may change with the publication of Gavin McCrea’s Mrs. Engels, a dazzling first novel narrated by one of Engels’s long-time mistresses and his eventual wife, an Irishwoman living in Manchester, England, named Lizzie Burns, about whom the historical record is almost silent but whom McCrea, in a thoughtful blend of research and imagination, has brought vibrantly to life. M r s . E n g e l s , by Gavin McCrea (Catapult, 388 pp., $16.95 paper) 1 7 5 R Engels and Burns couldn’t have come from more divergent backgrounds. Engels’s German father owned a flourishing textile manufacturing company, allowing his eldest son a privileged upbringing . Even as a teenager, Frederick (as he is called in the novel) was writing poetry and journalism, most of which directly contradicted his parents’ strict, conservative religious beliefs. (He wrote under a pseudonym for a time, to avoid conflict with his family.) Soon enough he was a full-fledged atheist radical, determined to help change society’s treatment of workers and the poor. His parents had hoped that he would join the family business, but when Engels was old enough to choose his path in life, he took a much di√erent direction. The early 1840s, when Engels was in his early twenties, were years that changed his life forever. In 1842 he met a young Irish worker named Mary Burns, and two years later in Paris he met Karl Marx, with whom he formed an intellectual partnership that would last the rest of his life. Mary Burns and her sister Lizzie, by contrast, were ordinary, uneducated Irishwomen, though it isn’t clear whether they labored in the mills in Manchester or were domestic servants. Engels , who had gone to Manchester from his native Prussia to work in management at the firm his father co-owned, Ermen and Engels , met the two fiercely committed women, who, like Engels, wanted to improve not only their own lot but the conditions of the working class in general. (There is no photograph extant of Mary and only one of Lizzie, in which she looks plump, rather ordinary, and not very pleased.) The young Engels was drawn to Mary first, and they lived together for almost twenty years (they considered traditional marriage far too ‘‘bourgeois’’ for them) until Mary’s death in 1863 from heart disease at the age of forty. She introduced Engels to the realities of working-class life in Manchester, the drudgery and overcrowding and grinding poverty. After Mary’s death, Engels became involved with Lizzie, one of the few references to whom was penned in a letter by Karl Marx’s daughter: ‘‘She was illiterate and could not read or write but she was true, honest and in some ways as fine-souled a woman as you could meet.’’ Lizzie died young as well, at fifty-one, and only a few hours before her death Engels, at her request, married her. Evidently in her last illness Lizzie’s religious upbringing overcame her political convictions. Engels later wrote of Lizzie: ‘‘My wife was a real child 1 7 6 J O H N S O N Y of the Irish proletariat and her passionate devotion to the class in which she was born was worth much more to me – and helped me more in times of stress – than all the elegance...