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Burn This Letter

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What to expect

'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 ménage à 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.

Critics Review

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
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

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