Mary Low: A Trotskyist with the POUM in Barcelona

Abstract

This article steps into the earliest ‘behind the lines’ days of the Spanish Civil War as seen through the idealist eyes of young Mary Low, who arrived to join the revolution in Barcelona together with the Cuban Juan Breá, her fellow Trotskyist and surrealist poet. Intrahistory (to use Unamuno’s term) cannot be fully told without such accounts, personal testimonies to the ideals which inspired and provoked the Civil War in Spain, and which were so often to end in disillusion and death, in one of the most destructive conflicts of the twentieth century. To follow Mary Low’s account and experiences is to understand something of why this was so.