Lizzie Burns

Common card · No. 267926

Lydia "Lizzie" Burns (6 August 1827 – 12 September 1878) was a working-class Irish woman, the wife of German philosopher Friedrich Engels. Lizzie Burns was a daughter of Michael Burns or Byrne, a dyer in a cotton mill, and of Mary Conroy. The family may have lived off Deansgate. Her mother died in 1835, and her father remarried a year later. Lizzie had an elder sister, Mary (1821–1863), a lifelong partner of Engels's until her sudden death of a heart disease. Mary Burns and Engels considered marriage a bourgeois institution and never married. In the 1850s, when Mary Burns and Engels lived in Ardwick, Lizzie stayed with them as a housekeeper, and, after her sister's death, eventually became Engels's partner. In the 1870s, they lived openly as a couple in London, with Lizzie's niece, Mary Ellen (known as Pumps), as a housekeeper. Both Lizzie and her sister were known as formally illiterate yet intelligent women, with strong working-class ties. They showed Engels the actual conditions of the...

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