In 1799 Susan O’Brien underwent an operation for breast cancer. She was 56 and, her sister having died of the disease, she nerved herself for the knife. The doctors insisted on blindfolding her during the operation, but she took nothing to ease the pain and remained fully conscious throughout. She was convinced that the operation would kill her, so she saw it rather like a public execution, and determined to die with dignity. She didn’t scream or weep once. The operation was a complete success, and she lived on for another 28 years.
This and many other plums are tightly packed into Joanna Martin’s book. Her bran tub is a massive collection of family letters exchanged between the women of the Fox-Strangways and Talbot families over four generations between the 1720s and the 1820s. Mostly based in country houses in Dorset and only rarely travelling to London, they wrote to each other constantly. Joanna Martin first stumbled on this trove in the attics of Penrice, the home of her grandmother in Wales, when as a student in the 1970s she discovered a vast and unexplored archive stuffed into packing cases and covered with two centuries of dust and dead flies.
The founder of the dynasty was Susanna Strangways, who was the heiress of Melbury in Dorset and married Thomas Horner of Mells in 1713. Horner was a bad-tempered, boorish squire, and when Susanna inherited money she left him behind and took off on an extended tour of the Continent, where she became rather too friendly with Henry Fox, who was several years younger than she. Back in England, she married off her only daughter, 13-year-old Elizabeth, to Stephen Fox, Henry’s brother, hence the name Fox-Strangways — a sharp dynastic alliance that caused much gossip.
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