Jenny Longuet

Jenny Caroline Marx Longuet (1 May 1844 – 11 January 1883) was the eldest daughter of Jenny von Westphalen Marx and Karl Marx. Briefly a political journalist writing under the pen name J. Williams, Longuet taught language classes and had a family of five sons and a daughter before her death to cancer at the age of 38.

Biography Early years

Jenny Caroline Marx, known to family and close friends as "Jennychen" to distinguish her from her mother, was born in Paris on 1 May 1844, the oldest daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen Marx. She was a fragile child but was nevertheless the first of the Marx children to survive childhood.

In 1868, at the age of 24, she accepted a position as a French language teacher in order to help her parents financially.

She met her future husband, the French journalist and radical political activist Charles Longuet in 1871. The pair became engaged in March 1872 and were married on 10 October the same year in a civil ceremony at St Pancras registry office, she taking the name Jenny Longuet.

As with her parents, the young couple faced economic hardship in their earliest years. They moved to Oxford soon after their marriage, hoping that Charles could find work as a teacher, but he was unable to do so. The minimal salary she earned at the school was supplemented by giving private lessons. Her husband obtained a position teaching French at King's College, together making enough to maintain a small house in London. She gave birth to a first son in September 1873, but the child died the following summer of diarrhea.

Return to France A political amnesty granted by the government of France in July 1880 allowed Charles Longuet the opportunity to return to his native country and he was quick to return, taking a position as an editor of La Justice, a radical daily newspaper founded by Georges Clemenceau. By this time, however, Jenny had begun to suffer from cancer and she for a time remained in London with her three sons, to be near her aging parents. The family settled in the town of Argenteuil, near Paris, where they were regularly visited by the boys' doting grandfather Karl Marx.

Despite her ill health, Jenny delivered another son, Marcel Longuet (1881–1949) who later worked as a journalist, including for the Parisian newspaper L'Aurore. A final child, a daughter also named Jenny Longuet, was born in September 1882 and lived until 1952. She likely passed away from cancer of the bladder, a condition which had afflicted her for some time. Her father was too ill to attend the funeral in France; he died two months later.

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