For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history.

Eleanor [Marx] was involved in the 1889 Paris congress resolution that established May Day as an annual demonstration of the international solidarity of labour in the demand for a legal eight-hour day.

One of the key things about the entitlement and power of patriarchy, but also within feminism, is not that it's wilful nastiness. But you can't ask for permission. You can negotiate and you can bring people on board and you can build a base but you can't expect for it to be given.

My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.

Eleanor Marx was her father's first biographer. All subsequent biographies of Karl Marx, and most of Engels, draw on her work as their primary sources for the family history, often without knowing it. I think if she'd been a son, she would have been referenced more.

A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.

When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness.