Author Gavin McCrea knew he didn’t want his first book to be a highly researched historical novel — but then he read about Lizzie Burns. "Mrs. Engels" is the debut novel McCrea never anticipated: a meditative imagining of Burns’ life in London with Friedrich Engels, the co-author of “The Communist Manifesto.” Engels’ philosophical partnership with Karl Marx is well-documented, but history leaves few clues about his relationship with Burns. All we really know is that Lizzie Burns became Engels’ lover after her sister Mary — Engels’ previous companion — died. That lack of historical detail left McCrea with plenty of room for artistic license.

Kurt Andersen: This is your first novel. You’re on the far side of your mid-30s — what took you so long to write it?

Gavin McCrea: Well I was doing what all writers do — travelling the world and taking drugs! I left Ireland when I was 21 and I’ve been travelling more or less ever since. And when I was in my 30s I woke up to the idea that if I ever wanted to do it, I should start.

Engels has always fascinated me — this young man running his family milling business becoming a radical anti-capitalist, but keeping his day job as an industrialist for decades so he can subsidize Mr. Communism. You weren’t tempted to novelize Friedrich Engels?

No. I was interested in Marx and Engels for a number of reasons but I wasn’t interested in writing about them until I came across Lizzie Burns. I actually came across Lizzie in a review of a biography of Engels. I subsequently bought the biography and realized how little was known about her and I took it from there.

As you depict it, Engels’ relationship with these working-class women [the Burns sisters] made him feel solidarity with the proletariat in ways he couldn’t have otherwise. They were sort of anti-trophy wives?

Yes, Engels was a womanizer, there’s no doubt about that. And he never actively did anything to improve the conditions in his family’s mill.

My sense of your take on Marxism and Communism is that you don’t fully embrace any theory that reduces people to historical abstractions. Is that fair?

That is fair. There’s one thing I thank my Catholic upbringing for, and it’s the healthy and very strong nose I have for bullshit. When you’ve rejected a system of belief that has been imposed upon you as a child, it’s very difficult to replace it. So I see Communism in that same way. There’s so much that Marx writes that’s absolutely compelling, however, Marx completely disregarded the idea of the individual. This idea of the proletariat ignores the differences between workers — their racial distinctions, their sexual distinctions, their local struggles and needs, and subsumes them into this global struggle. I’m not quite sure I’m entirely comfortable with that.