Burn This Letter

Susan Pedersen’s deeply researched and very engagingly written insight into the very unusual marriages of the Balfour brothers flashes new light onto an entire age. Victorian and Edwardian upper-class convention, hidden sexualities, hypocrisy, requited passion and a genuinely rigid adherence to duty: the author methodically uncovers and examines them all. The psychopathology of Lady Frances Balfour is a major historical revelation in itself. Such a gem of a book. – Andrew Roberts, author of CHURCHILL: WALKING WITH DESTINY
A gripping narrative of love, loathing and ambition amongst the Victorian elite. Abusive husbands, a secret child, country house miseries: it’s all at once distant and disturbingly modern. For anyone thinking about how to reimagine marriage and motherhood today, this account of how one late-Victorian aristocratic family lived it is at once example and warning. – Stella Tillyard, author of ARISTOCRATS
[A] remarkable story. We must be grateful that the recipients ignored one another’s frequent exhortations to set fire to the missives after reading … Pederson is as interested in her heroines’ social lives as she is in their political ambitions. And here is where the book earns its place on the history curriculum … More fascinating than these salacious intricacies is the relationship between the women: almost-sisters, sister-wives, allies, rivals and something more that their society had no name for * New Statesman *
Fascinating and evocative – Daily Mail
Dazzling … A chronicle of their extraordinarily active private and public lives … Pedersen animates them with conviction … Her protagonists are impulsive, gossipy, generous and undeniably intriguing. She is particularly good at tracing the shifting, shimmering patterns of allegiance and jealousy in the costly fabric of high political society between the 1880s and the First World War – Jane Robinson * Times Literary Supplement *
Praise for THE GUARDIANS * : *
The first indispensable book written on a critical subject in fifty years! Far-minded, hard-hitting and readable. The Guardians is magnificent, telling a complex yet compelling story * Wall Street Journal *
Richly detailed and genuinely revelatory * Guardian *

Susan Pedersen

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