My Name is Martha Brown - Hardcover

Based on a true story, a captivating tale of passionate love and violent death in 1850s Dorset.

In 1856, Martha Brown was publicly hanged for the brutal murder of her husband. Among those who witnessed her death was a sixteen-year-old local lad, and the memory of her execution haunted him for the rest of his life. Corresponding to a friend many years later, he wrote thus: ‘I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’ The writer was Thomas Hardy.

Martha Brown was an ordinary woman of humble parentage, probably illiterate. Very little is known about her. Despite a small team of dedicated researchers delving into old records and original sources to try and piece together her life story, she remains tantalising and elusive, seemingly exercising a strange and powerful spell, even from the grave. We do know that John Brown was her second husband. His age on the marriage certificate is given as twenty-one; Martha’s as forty-one. Why did John and Martha marry? After all, she was twenty years his senior – hardly commonplace as we reach the millennium, never mind the 1850s. She was described as ‘a wonderful-looking woman with beautiful curls’. It is easy to see why she would have married a handsome, younger, virile man who could perhaps release her from a life of tedium and drudgery. Why did he marry Martha? Some people have suggested it was for money – she’d inherited a legacy of some fifty pounds from her deceased first husband. Did the age difference that eventually led him into the arms of a much younger and prettier girl lead to jealousy, a precipitating factor in the tragedy – if Martha did indeed kill John?

Nicola Thorne was born in South Africa and educated at the LSE. A prolific writer of historical and contemporary fiction, she is one of the top PLR earners in the country.