Many of us have had that experience of being in love with someone and then they end up being your enemy and there's a stranger in your bed.

Eleanor Marx was a pragmatic person of actions and deeds and she was an organizer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We're all story-telling creatures, and also I think that's the point about biography because the life is exemplary.