Since the late 19th century the Irish sisters Mary and Lizzie Burns have lived on in the twilight zone occupied by so many other women associated with famous men. Little is known about them apart from the fact that Mary was the common-law wife of Friedrich Engels, political theorist and friend and patron of Karl Marx. After Mary's death, in her early 40s, Lizzie took her sister's place in Engels's affections. It was Lizzie who became, on her deathbed, the legal Mrs Engels.
And, like many other ghostly women, it’s now Lizzie’s turn to be exhumed from the graveyard of the historical footnote and restored to life by an author’s imagination. She presents an exciting but daunting project. Gavin McCrea has not only to bring to life a real but basically unknowable woman but also to reimagine her very well-documented entourage of formidable intellects: Engels himself, Marx, the Marx family and the cabals of continental revolutionaries that surrounded them.
With Lizzie, McCrea has a free hand. She could be anything he cares to make her. Zealot, coquette, helpmeet, dreamer, waif or even intellectual.
McCrea takes the modish reductionist option. The Lizzie he creates is a hard-headed woman of 50 who lays her cards on the table from the first page. All a woman cares for in a man, she states, “is the mint that jingles in his pockets”. At this point she and Engels are on a train, in a “high-class carriage”, moving from the dens of proletarian Manchester to London. Here they will take up residence in a fine house in Primrose Hill in order to be near the Marxes, to whom Engels is devoted.
“The good and the bad come to an even naught,” Lizzie tells us, “and the only thing left to recommend him is his money.” With Engels, mill owner and generous dispenser of sovereigns, Lizzie has fallen on her feet – and she knows it.
It’s an impressive opening, impeccably written in the idiom of Lizzie’s time. To my mind this is the only way to write a convincing historical novel, certainly when it’s told in the first person. It also contains a delectable irony. Engels, a great materialist but surely also an arch romantic, finds himself in the hands of an arch materialist. And Lizzie is intelligent, with plenty of opinions about people, and about life and its sorrows.
Dispiriting voice
But that voice is also dispiriting. The narrator seems to have shot her bolt already, and the prospect of perhaps having to stay with this limited personality across a few hundred pages is by no means appealing. One won’t have to, surely. Lizzie will reveal hidden depths or her sensibility will change. Or, at the very least, new insights into the fascinating figures she moves among will make up for her deficiencies.
Unfortunately, this hope largely comes to nothing. For all Lizzie’s articulacy and colourful phrasemaking, that shrewd and loveless voice of a person on the make is unrelenting.
McCrea does do his best to imbue her with feeling, anteriorly at least, providing her with a backstory that might be affecting.
Early in life, for example, Lizzie had a relationship with Moss, or Donal Og, an Irish nationalist revolutionary. But it didn’t work out, and he infected her with a disease that made her barren. Lizzie continues to pursue Donal, however, and presses on him purses of sovereigns for “the cause” – a cause Engels is impatient with because, to him, it dilutes the bigger issue of the class battle.
Lizzie is wistful, as well, for the class she has left behind. She refuses to ingratiate herself with the ladies of Primrose Hill, seeks out the company of the servants, treating them to would-be genteel but drunken suppers upstairs that nobody enjoys. She insists on cleaning and polishing herself.
Nowhere in her new life is she comfortable. In bed with Engels, or in Jenny Marx’s drawing room, she is always self-conscious, always watching with that shrewd disenchanted eye of hers, always drearily playing a role she has no heart for. There’s an obvious if knotted irony in this: the discomfort of the proletarian displaced from her milieu.
Pity for Engels
In the end, however, any pity or liking we feel is not for her but for poor Friedrich, who has lost Mary, his true love, and has to make do with Lizzie; for Karl, whose genius is ignored and is reduced here to hardly more than a beard and his carbuncles; and, above all, for Jenny Marx, who needs and wants Lizzie’s friendship and is only grudgingly given a pinched facsimile of it.
The basic problem may be that, being a man, the author doesn’t succeed in inhabiting Lizzie as a woman. Women writing as men and vice versa have become commonplace, and we take it for granted that it’s easily done and sure to be successful. But a credibly feminine Lizzie eludes McCrea. When she talks of her new gown, or her stays, it seems incongruous. He equips her with feet “like boats” and a straightforwardness that seems mannish. Lizzie is never soft or spontaneous or wayward – except with the drink, or “lush”, as she calls it with a frequency that starts to grate. Maybe it’s simply that she lacks complexity.
There are several admirable scenes in Mrs Engels. A touching one occurs in Ramsgate, where Lizzie and Jenny are sent off for a holiday together and Jenny braves the waters while Lizzie, predictably, refuses the opportunity. The writing is consistently true to the period, a virtuoso performance. But the effect of it all is like a play that disappoints even though the costumes are gorgeous.
Anne Haverty's novels include The Free and Easy
