Helen Macfarlane

Who was Helen Macfarlane?

Helen Macfarlane, born Barrhead, September 25, 1818, died Nantwich, March 29, 1860, was a Scottish Chartist feminist journalist and philosopher, known for her 1850 translation into English of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels which was published in German in 1848. Between April 1850 and December 1850, Macfarlane wrote three essays for George Julian Harney’s monthly, the Democratic Review and ten articles for his weekly paper, the Red Republican. In 1851 Macfarlane “disappeared” from the political scene. Until recent research by Macfarlane’s biographer, David Black and BBC Radio Scotland researcher and broadcaster, Louis Yeoman, very little was known for sure about her early and later life. Yeoman writes of Macfarlane:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a period drama must be in want of a feisty heroine who finds love at last. But our heroine, Helen Macfarlane was no fictional character and her life would have shocked Jane Austen’s smocks off.”