Month: November 2006

Emma Brooke (no relation), “New Woman” novelist (under the pseudonym E. Fairfax Byrne, she wrote A Superfluous Woman, Life the Accuser, and others) and Fabian socialist, who criticised H. G. Wells’s analysis of “the Sex-Question” as being from “an entirely middle-class point of view” and helped to draft the Fabians’ first statement in support of equal citizenship rights for women; born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, 22 December 1844, died in Weybridge, Surrey, 28 November 1926.

Ernest Balfort Bax, founder – along with William Morris, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling – of the Socialist League in 1884; born in Leamington, 23 July 1854, died in London, 26 November 1918.

Simon Bernard, Fourierist socialist, briefly Inspecteur général de l’économie after the 1848 Revolution, founder of the Club Bonne-Nouvelle, in and out of prison at various times, and kicked out of Spain, Belgium and Germany. He lived in exile in Britain, 1851-62, he is most famous for his participation in the 1858 Orsini plot to kill Napoleon III. The political and diplomatic fall-out from the plot prompted Lord Palmerston’s resignation as Prime Minister after the Conspiracy to Murder Bill failed in the Commons. Bernard was prosecuted as an accessory to murder and acquitted by an Old Bailey jury on 17 April 1858. Born in Carcassonne on 28 January 1817, died in the Brooke House lunatic asylum, Upper Clapton, London, on 25 November 1862.

Louie Bennett, suffragist (founder and first secretary of the Irishwomen’s Suffrage Federation), co-operative socialist (founder of the Irish Women’s Reform League) and pacifist (founder member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom); born in Temple Hill, near Dublin, 1870, died in  Killiney, also near Dublin, 25 November 1956.