Quakers Seeing Red

Helen gets a review

The Friend, Britain’s Quaker magazine has just published (15 November, 2024) a review by Simon Webb of Red Chartist: Collected Annotated works of Helen Macfarlane, BPC, 2024.

In this extract Simon says:

‘It must occasionally happen that translators would rather not work on a particular passage. Perhaps such a thing happened to the Scottish Chartist Helen Macfarlane when she was translating The Communist Manifesto from its original German. She was a socialist with strong religious beliefs, whereas Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels seem to have regarded religion as a dead end.’

You can read it full on The Friend website

(The Quakers are generous folk. Their publication allows visitors a couple of freebie reads before the paywall kicks in.)

And if you want to know more about Helen’s remarkable life see the biography I published earlier this year: Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane - 1818-60