Marlene Hobsbawm - Meet Me in Buenos Aires; a memoir

T he Hobsbawms Eric and Marlene always seemed to me an example of a perfect couple, mutually devoted and at the same time welcoming friends to their house with extraordinary generosity. Invitations to dinners came regularly, to Sunday lunches, to visit them in their cottage in Wales, to celebrate at memorable parties. With Marlene and Eric you always enjoyed yourselves good talk, good jokes, good arguments, good friends, good food, good wine. And Marlene was cook and organiser, while also teaching music, raising the children and dealing with every sort of practical problem thrown up by family life and marriage to a hard-working and celebrated husband.

I knew Eric by reputation when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and my friend Neal Ascherson was taught by him and spoke of him with admiration. While researching my first book in the early 1970s, I therefore consulted Eric on some historical points. My subject was Mary Wollstonecraft, who proclaimed the rights of women in the 1790s, and my impression was that he was not exactly a feminist, while being more kind and helpful in his response than I could have hoped, as indeed he was whenever I asked for advice or help. He also wrote the occasional review for me when I worked on the New Statesman in the mid-seventies, and this was when I went to their house in Hampstead for the first time and met Marlene. I thought she was amazing and we formed a friendship that has strengthened ever since: forty-five years, I make it.

I realise now how little I knew of her early life, although we were almost the same age and both had continental origins I French, she Viennese. I understood she had been brought to England as a small child when her father, a successful businessman, saw how dangerous Hitler was. I once asked her about learning a second language and she gave me a charming account of how she had refused to speak a word of English for a long time I suppose it was a form of protest at being uprooted but that one day her mother, listening outside the room where she was playing alone, heard her addressing her dolls in perfectly good English. The stubborn, clever child predicted the versatile and charming woman.

Reading her memoir I realise that she and I shared the experience of being sent off to boarding schools we did not always like she ran away, I fell ill and that as young women we were both exploring Paris at about the same time, studying French history, reading Gide and Colette, entranced by Les Enfants du Paradis, Prvert, Charles Trenet, and the streets, bridges, parks and paintings in the galleries.

We both also went through the then almost obligatory ritual for young women of learning secretarial skills. After that she, with immense dash, took herself to Italy and found jobs in Rome and Capri, lived a life of utmost sophistication, and moved on to work in the Congo for a year. Adventurous, brave and loyal, she made friends wherever she went, and kept them.

She was twenty-nine when she met and married Eric. He was already known as a scholar, teacher and historian whose books became instant classics, and was greatly in demand as a speaker all over the world. Marlene often travelled with him while also bringing up their son and daughter and establishing a home life that gave him time and space to work. In my head Im a continental woman, she writes: I think this means she knows how to combine domestic and intellectual life and make it look easy.

But it is not easy. Marlene gave Eric the support he needed to achieve greatness while always remaining a strong and decisive person in her own right. In effect, she taught him by her strength to respect feminism. Her memoir, starting from the sadness of exile and war in childhood, reveals her on every page as enterprising, courageous and warm-hearted and is a delight to read.

Claire Tomalin

July 2019