‘Burn This Letter’ by Susan Pedersen review

With an opening scene befitting any melodrama, Burn This Letter lifts the curtain on two marriages, the curiosities of which have hitherto attracted little attention. On 22 July 1887, the day after becoming engaged, 19-year-old Lady Betty Lytton received a letter from her future sister-in-law, Lady Frances Balfour, explaining how she had lived for the past five years ‘in the closest friendship’ with Betty’s betrothed. Making no mention of her own husband Eustace, Frances described her love for his brother, Gerald, eliciting a most generous response from Betty: ‘My eager hope is that you should both feel I would not for the whole world separate you.’ Susan Pedersen then keeps us apprised as, negotiating difficulties created by desire, duty, and, it must be said, delusion, the protagonists act out their roles in society assigned by birth and temperament.

All were born into the highest echelons of society, ancestry bringing rank, if not wealth. Frances Campbell was the tenth child of the duke of Argyll, Highland landowner and Liberal defender in the House of Lords, Betty was the eldest of the five children of Lord Lytton, a ‘poor peer’, viceroy of India during her childhood, while Gerald and Eustace were younger sons in a Lowland Scots family, enfolded after their parents’ deaths into that of their uncle, the Conservative statesman Lord Salisbury. Their eldest brother, Arthur, followed in Salisbury’s footsteps as prime minister; Gerald was Conservative MP for Leeds Central (1885-1906). Pedersen’s lively prose animates her subjects’ early years, despite it being a familiar tale. The men went out into the world, educated at public school and university; the women remained at home. Frances, independent, argumentative, and bored, complained: ‘I have no work, no physical hard work to do & that I want.’ Her idea of training as a nurse rejected, she took the conventional exit, in 1878 accepting, at the age of 20, Eustace Balfour’s proposal of marriage.

As Lady Frances Balfour she moved into 32 Addison Road, Eustace’s stucco Kensington villa. Having of necessity to find a profession, he had settled on architecture, but we learn little of his commissions, glimpsing him mainly through the entries and symbols made by Frances in her diaries, interpreted by Pedersen as indicating a certain incompatibility in the bedroom. It is this close reading of the diaries and of the lifetime of letters exchanged between Frances and Betty that ensures this book is a page-turner. Despite potential rivalry, the women settled into what the author terms ‘a relationship – intimate, contentious and consequential’, commemorated in albums of their letters collated by Betty after Frances’ death in 1931, ‘leaving the passions and secrets in’. These lead us through the years after Betty and Gerald’s marriage when they, too, lived on Addison Road, in a house found for them by Frances. It was her idea to establish a ‘Colony’, ‘an interwoven ménage à quatre’, that, however, stopped short of marital infidelity. For, in an astonishingly explicit letter, Frances revealed to Betty’s father that before Gerald’s marriage she had ‘over & over told him I was willing to do anything & to break any tie at his bidding, & he always showed me all that you know makes these positions so “inexorably” impossible’. This from a woman whose two volumes of autobiography (Ne Obliviscaris: Dinna Forget, 1925) give not a hint of raging passion.

Frances’ ‘close friendship’ with Gerald was heightened by his involvement in politics, their association placing her where she wanted to be, at the heart of the political world. She spent long hours in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons listening to debates and, before his marriage, it was to rooms rented in 32 Addison Road that he had returned during the parliamentary season. After the establishment of the Colony this intimacy continued until 1895 when Gerald and Betty moved to Dublin on his appointment as chief secretary for Ireland. By then Frances had secured her reputation as a promoter of women’s rights, lobbying for bills calling for the parliamentary vote for women.

Untangling the complications of the suffrage campaign, Pedersen describes how Frances, an excellent speaker with a wide network of parliamentary contacts, became the main liaison between suffragists and MPs. From 1897 she was not only a member of the executive committee of the newly founded National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the constitutional wing of the suffrage movement, but an active campaigner, travelling the country to speak at meetings as, over the years, the militant wing, led by Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), increased the pressure on the government. Although galvanised by the commitment of her sister, Lady Constance Lytton, who as a member of the WSPU endured imprisonment and forcible feeding, Betty, too, remained a constitutional suffragist.

The women’s adoption of feminism is given piquancy when set against the travails of their private lives. Nursed by Frances, Eustace died of alcoholism in February 1911 and in the same month Gerald began an affair so bizarre as to defy comprehension. Suffice to say it involved the Society for Psychical Research and a woman who took dictation from deceased Cambridge academics. Directed that she and Gerald must conceive a messiah, they followed the instructions to the letter. After the birth the mother found little further use for Gerald and, ever saintly, Betty forgave.

While Betty is known to historians of the suffrage movement mainly as editor of The Letters of Lady Constance Lytton (1925), Frances’ political career has previously been traced by Joan Huffman in Lady Frances: Frances Balfour, Aristocrat Suffragist (2018). But, by producing a group biography, Pedersen gives new depth to her subjects. Historians may consider it ironic that it is the beating heart of seemingly staid Lady Frances Balfour that has been exposed, while other more obviously picturesque campaigners keep their secrets. We can only be grateful that, in this instance, instructions to ‘burn this letter’ were ignored.

• Burn This Letter: Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four
  Susan Pedersen
  John Murray, 352pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Elizabeth Crawford is a historian of the women’s suffrage movement.