Overview

'BURN THIS!' Why did so many letters between Lady Frances and Lady Betty Balfour begin this way? What did they have to hide? Alike in so many ways - political, passionate, argumentative and deeply intelligent. It's no surprise that once Frances and Betty became sisters-in-law, they became close friends. There was just one problem. Frances was in love with Betty's husband. Their unconventional solution they found was an 'experiment in living', a menage a quatre. Setting up homes on the same street, they shared everything: money, meals, governesses, and husbands. When Susan Pedersen discovered their amazing cache of letters, she was spellbound. 'We tend to see elite women of this era romantically - we wonder whom they will marry and track that marriage plot - but we don't always follow them into their marriages, as they struggle to live consequential lives. Marriage isn't the end of women's lives. It can be, as it was for Frances and Betty, the catalyst to political activism.' Her book follows their extraordinary friendship as both women seized every freedom afforded to them by the changing times, leaving their drawing rooms for the streets and the soapbox, joining the fight for the women's vote. This is the untold story of two women - radicals, rivals, sisters - who carved a path together through an elite male world, sharing their ideals, their heartbreaks, and most of all, their secrets.

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9781399806237

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Reviews

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

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

Author Information

Raised in Japan to Canadian missionary parents, Susan Pedersen was surprised to become a professor at Harvard and then Columbia universities, teaching British, European and international history. Her books have sought to explain how welfare states shape families, how international organizations handle empires, and how women come to challenge political inequality and domestic subjection. Her children now grown, she divides her time between London and New York. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books and is the author of several acclaimed books. Her most recent book The Guardians was awarded the 2015 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature.

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