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 DESTINYA 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

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.

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