Gavin McCrea: 'I wanted to be Engels' mistress'

The debut novelist describes the imaginative journey that writing Mrs Engels took him on, to reach two women who barely register in history

Mrs Engels is the story of two sisters’ love for the same man. Mary Burns, a poor mill worker, meets Friedrich Engels, the mill-owner’s son, in 1842, when she is 18. She has a semi-clandestine relationship with him until her death some 20 years later. On account of his communist views, Engels rejects the institution of marriage. He supports Mary and remains emotionally attached to her, but he is not interested in monogamy, children or traditional family life. When Mary dies, her younger sister, Lizzie, begins a relationship with him. Lizzie is Friedrich’s lover and companion until her death in 1878.

I came across the Burns sisters in Tristram Hunt’s biography of Engels. It was a chance meeting. Indeed, it was barely a meeting at all. The Burnses were illiterate and left no diaries or letters of their own, so there isn’t much known about them. Ghosts in the record, they waft in and out of rooms dominated by the great hulks of Engels and his friend Karl Marx. Despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of historical weight, I knew immediately that I’d write a novel about them.

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