ABSTRACT
From 1875 Clara began visiting the Marxs alone or with her brother Wilfred. From the age of 15 she was considered old enough to be allowed to undertake the journey alone. The distance from Crouch End to Highgate was under two miles. By the following September, she complained, ‘I wish Tussy would come back from Carlsbad, it’s as dull as ditchwater without her.’5 The age difference now that both girls were almost adults seemed less than at their earlier meetings. Eleanor had been visiting Carlsbad in Germany, to take the waters at ‘The Queen of Bohemian Watering Places’. She had been there before, on the recommendation of her doctor, Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson, who believed it might help to relieve the ‘hysteria’ or what we would now call stress, from which she had recently been suffering. Her nervous condition had been brought on as a result of her engagement to Hyppolite Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, of whom her parents disapproved. Lissagaray, as he was known to his friends, was twice Eleanor’s age. He was one of the refugees from the Paris Commune and had written a book on the subject, which Eleanor had translated. He had a poor reputation with women, which, along with her parents’ antagonism towards her engagement, and the trauma of the death of Jenny’s first child, proved too much for Eleanor’s delicate constitution, resulting in insomnia and an inability to eat.
