Mary Burns (29 September 1821[1] – 7 January 1863)[2][3][4] was a working-class Irish woman, best known as the lifelong partner of Friedrich Engels.
The only direct references to her that have survived are a letter from Karl Marx to Engels on learning of her death, saying she was "very good natured" and "witty", and a letter from Marx's daughter, Eleanor, saying she was "very pretty, witty and an altogether charming girl, but in later years drank to excess".
It is theorised, though not recorded, that Burns guided Engels through the region, showing him the worst districts of Salford and Manchester for his research for The Condition of the Working Class in England.
[11] Frank McGuinness dramatised her and her sister's lives in the play Mary and Lizzie (1989).
[12] She was also the subject of the poem Mary, written in 1845 by Georg Weerth, who had met her in Brussels the same year.