A woman gets engaged and immediately receives a note from another woman claiming to be closely related to her new fiancé. Scandalously, that woman is the fiance’s own sister-in-law and doesn’t understand why her boyfriend’s new fiance has to tear them apart. What if the couples – two brothers and their wives – move into a house on the same street and embrace an unconventional attitude to their wedding vows?
Are we in New York, where polyamory is an emerging trend for young professionals unconvinced by traditional relationship models? Or are we in a California commune in 1967, at the height of the free love movement?
Neither. We are in high society London, the year is 1887 and the women have married the brothers of Tory politician Arthur Balfour. Their homes – which they fondly call “The Colony” for this purpose foursome – are Victorian mansions in the heart of Kensington. Their “intimate female friendship” would span half a century, the deaths of both men, betrayals, tragedies, bankruptcies, political upheavals and a world war. And they will be important in the campaign for women’s suffrage.
This is the world of Lady Frances Balfour (née Campbell, daughter of the eighth Duke of Argyll) and Lady Betty Balfour (née Bulwer-Lytton), as told by historian Susan Pedersen. Although it is more accurate to say that it was told by Frances and Betty and discovered by Pederson, who delved into the copious correspondence sent between the two women to tell this remarkable story. We should be grateful that the recipients ignored each other’s frequent urges to set the messages on fire after reading them (hence the book’s provocative title). In doing so, they left for posterity “the kind of uncensored exchanges we see today in a group chat.”
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This is a story of the suffragette movement told through two of its most elite figures. “Here, the outgoing conservative prime minister’s two sisters-in-law chastise the incoming liberal’s wife for her husband’s radical hatred of women’s suffrage,” notes Pederson. “They argue with Millicent Fawcett and Christabel Pankhurst about tactics.”
It’s a soap opera, with a bonus insight into turn-of-the-century mysticism, automatic writing, the obfuscation of scientific and “psychic” research, and communication with spirits on the other side.
But let’s start with politics. The perennial question of the suffrage movement is whether the militants were instrumental in winning the vote for women, or so toxic to public opinion that they set their cause back a generation. Frances and Betty provide an intriguing counterpoint. Married, aristocratic, steeped in privilege, they don’t fit the stereotype of the impassioned suffragette calling for arrest and hunger strike. They inhabit a world in which an upper-class woman can attend the Palace of Westminster whenever she wants, survey the room from the gallery, drink tea with the Prime Minister and even lobby to change legislation – as they both do. By 1895, we are told, Frances had become “a ubiquitous presence in parliament”, a de facto “Member for Women”, who knew far more about politics than her architect husband, Eustace, or even Betty’s husband Gerald, who served as a minister in the Balfour government.
Their position is uniquely contradictory of influence and powerlessness. “I think I will take Gerald’s advice and go to the House this Prime Minister and ask to see Asquith,” Frances wrote to Betty in July 1908, as the suffrage movement gathered steam. “Things are very difficult. I don’t think anyone outside can understand … how dangerous it is to play with the whole question.”
By this time, as Pederson points out, activists had endured four decades of soaring hopes and crushing disappointments. They all followed the same playbook. Elite and resilient women write articles, give speeches and address MPs explaining the injustice of their continued exclusion from the political sphere and its real-world consequences in terms of poverty, neglect and abuse. Male MPs listen kindly, drafting and debating legislation, only nothing happens.
The methods embraced by Emmeline Pankhurst and her Women’s Social and Political Union horrify our heroines, but the energy of the suffragettes also inspires them after years of disillusionment. In Betty’s sister, Constance, we see the class dynamics of the suffrage campaign revealed. As “Lady Constance”, she is spared the harsh police treatment of her comrades even when she participated in civil disobedience; when she assumes the persona of a working-class con artist, she brutally preys on others – prompting her patrician relatives to suddenly take an interest in the case.
It may take another eight years and a struggle for (some) women to finally achieve the right to vote, having proven their contribution to the country at a time of national crisis, but the story of Burn this Letter it is he who relies on tactics to attract the attention of militants along with the protection of political women like Frances and Betty. Sometimes the distinction is blurred.
In the 1918 elections, both were asked to stand as candidates. Or she may have been Britain’s first female MP. An obituary for Frances in 1931 noted that “had Lady Frances lived at another age, she might have become Britain’s first woman Prime Minister”.
However, Pederson is as interested in the social lives of her heroines as she is in their political ambitions. And this is where the book earns its place in the history curriculum. Because there are countless accounts of the suffrage movement, much less the real-life story of two women who made a “compact” with each other and promised to remain “united by the one thing that gives glory to life—love.” It’s a story that exposes the intimacy of late Victorian family life, complete with love triangles, shared household expenses and secret children.
If you’ve found yourself wondering what the men involved think about it all, the book offers hints and guesses. But mostly the focus remains on their women: Frances’ love, first requited and then unrequited, for her husband’s brother; Betty’s strange acceptance of this fact and willingness to please him; and thus the inseparable bond of the couple. There’s a fantastic subplot involving Betty’s husband Gerald as the suffragettes are marching on Westminster, involving a psychic love affair and illusions of conjuring the Messiah, which have to be read to be believed. Let’s just say that Betty’s practice of living in a “colony” and sharing her husband with another woman didn’t go to waste.) Manhattan polyamorous millennials take note: there’s nothing new under the sun.
But more fascinating than these strange complications is the relationship between the women: almost sisters, sister-wives, allies, rivals, and something more that their society had no name for. In a way, “Frances and Betty were ‘married’ less to their insecure husbands than to each other,” Pederson muses. It is to Betty that Frances entrusts her letters when she dies, which she once instructed him to burn. It is thanks to their lifelong commitment to each other that this fascinating story, which challenges so much of what we think we know about morals, values, family dynamics and how to achieve Victorian political change, survives at all.
Burn this letter: Love and trouble in a marriage of four
Susan Pedersen
John Murray, 352pp, £25
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(Further reading: The harsh visions of Douglas Stuart)
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