The second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, she married revolutionary writer Paul Lafargue in 1868.

[1] Laura Marx was born in Brussels and moved with her parents to France, then Prussia, before the family settled in London in June 1849.

Paul Lafargue, born in Santiago De Cuba, was a young French socialist who came to London in 1866 to work for the First International.

Lafargue wrote:[3] Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others.

[5] He later told his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, "If one cannot work for the Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the Lafargues.