Helen Macfarlane

Helen Macfarlane, born Barrhead, 25 September 1818 (registered in the Abbey [i.e. landward] Parish of Paisley), Renfrewshire, Scotland, died Nantwich, Cheshire, England 29 March 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 (which changed its name to the Friend of the People in December 1850). In 1851 Macfarlane "disappeared" from the political scene. Until recent research by Macfarlane's biographer David Black and BBC Radio Scotland researcher and broadcaster Louise 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.