Edith Simcox and George Eliot, by Mackenzie

[p024] Edith Simcox and George Eliot. By K. A. McKenzie. Oxford University Press, 18s Edith Simcox was a_ repressed Victorian spinster who combined altruism and intellectual penetration to an unusual degree. At the age of 28 she fell in love with George Eliot —by no means the only woman to do so—and remained a life-long devotee. Her twisted, sad and in many ways noble life has been re- constructed by Professor McKenzie, largely from her unpublished auto- biography. Politically, Edith Simcox was a radical, tinged with the Positivism prevalent in George Eliot’s circle. She fought for the emancipation of women and for the abolition of poverty, particularly in the sweated trades. Indeed, she identified the She had the insight to attribute both sex inequality and working class poverty to the institu- tions of class society. ‘The first thinkers of the first ages’, she wrote in The Nineteenth Century (Sept. 1887), ‘were taken from the class of gentlemen of leisure, rulers of men, possessed of whatever experience life then could teach; their leisure was secured by the industry of wives and slaves, and any latent aptitude their sisters may have had for religion or philosophy was sacrificed to the necessity for grinding corn or looking after the maids.’ Edith’s life was neither secluded nor entirely academic. She organized the tailoresses of Westminster and Pimlico. She ran, for nine years, a shirtmakers’ co-operative society. She and Emma Paterson were the first two women to be admitted as delegates to the TUC, at its eighth Congress in 1875. In 1877 she joined with Hermann Jung and Harriet Law, who had served on Marx’s_ General Council, in an attempt to revive the First International. It was largely for her internationalist sympathies and activities that Broadhurst secured her exclusion from the TUC. Edith Simcox’s major work. Primitive Civilizations, or outlines of the history of ownership in archaic communities, was at once a work of scholarship and a powerful denuncia- tion of class exploitation. Her analysis of society, however, just stopped short of socialism. She sought the humanization of class relations rather than the abolition of classes. In this, however, she teflected fairly accurately the prevail- ing view among workers as well as among the radical bourgeoisie. Shy, selfless and incorruptible, she made her contribution. Her memory has been revived in this conscientious, if rather unimaginative, monograph. H.C. Three-Cornered Fight