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.
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