It was women who did the stripping and dragging. In what MC calls a most unwomanly and rude action, they abused her as a whore, pulled me up and down, and left me not a rag, taking away even clothes that were in the wash. Her husband stood supinely by, claiming that it was not his doing.

The Carrington children were looked after, in part, by nurses, an arrangement from which DC suffered harmful consequences: she was troubled throughout her life by intense nightmares, of which a frequent subject was being beaten at the hands of her nurses.

She also writes about being abducted and raped by a group of soldiers, and of wandering El Retiro park in Madrid in ragged clothes until she was returned to her hotel by a police officer.

In March 1905, after Catherine had become pregnant, Herbert insisted the child could not be his own (he suspected the Prince of Wales or other celebrities of being the father). When doctors were summoned he threatened his wife with a revolver; she disarmed him and threw the weapon out of a window. He was certified insane and admitted to an institution, where he remained for life. The marriage had lasted less than five months.

Welbeck Abbey, where LJC was based with both her married sister, Elizabeth , and her unmarried one, Frances , fell to Roundhead forces and for a year harboured a garrison of which they were virtual prisoners.

EC was attacked by no less than five men who inflicted serious bodily harm. This was probably anti-Catholic violence.

It is now known that Philip Stanhope was not, as was long believed, the Thomas Grimes who brutally raped the thirteen-year-old Teresia Constantia Phillips on 17 November 1721.

On another occasion: He Swore—Damn mee for a Bitch did I Hector him, he wou'd fell me to the ground.

This tale of a lady and a groom was said to have ended with the latter's death from a gunshot wound in 1792. This was officially pronounced to be suicide, but rumour said that her father got one of her brothers to kill him because of his relationship with HC . Local tradition says further that his skeleton was dug up and sent to Helen after she had left home, and that the ghosts of both lovers still walk at Arbigland. Adriana Craciun observes that The Romance of Helen Craik reads like a popular novel of the time.

With employers of whom she was less fond, the physical contrast seemed charged with potential. Of Margaret Henderson she wrote: She was fussy and whining like, & yet so small & feeble. It seem'd hard to be provoked so by her, & for me to be patient & meek to one as I could crush with one hand almost & I so much taller nor her. But she knew she was the lady & I knew I was her servant . . . . Of this place, HC reflects, I was on the whole like the man in the family. In her diary of 1863, she describes lifting Munby himself with ease, and in her 1872 diary records his sitting on her lap more than once.

Believing misreports against her, LMC 's first husband threw her and her very Godly and discreet gentlewoman, Abigail Hamilton , out of the house at sword point in the middle of the night. Both women were naked, and Lady Margaret was pregnant.

She was lastingly impressed by an incident at her school when a boy raped a girl at knife-point. The boy was removed to a borstal or school for young offenders, but the headmaster then addressed the whole school to tell them that in cases of rape the blame was shared equally by both parties.

In each case her move followed an outbreak of political violence: her Dublin house was attacked by an anti-communist mob before she moved to Belfast, and that city became a scene of pogroms before she moved on.

This date was written on a threatening letter thrust into Lady FD 's hand, signed Liberty, saying she would be assassinated if she did not cease her activity in Irish political matters.

JD was beaten up in a Covent Garden alley, near the London theatres, probably to punish him for a verse lampoon on people in high places, An Essay upon Satire, which was very likely not written by him at all.

At the age of six NES was subjected to clitoridectomy with one of her sisters, an experience with which she opens her book The Hidden Face of Eve. She also spoke openly at a women's conference and to the press, about the shock, the blood, and the long-continuing pain of this mutilation.

At Salisbury in WiltshireKE was stripped and whipped for her preaching.

When Alan Sillitoe's father beat him, his mother (apparently afraid of serious injury) would cry out: Not on his head. Not on his head.

Another aspect of this scandal was that in counter-charging her husband with cruelty (as she was empowered to do by the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 28 August 1857), Helen Codrington alleged that while EF was formerly living with the Codringtons, in October 1856, her husband had one night entered the room where the two women were sleeping and had tried to rape Faithfull, who successfully resisted him.

In this particular instance domestic violence and the institutionalized cruelty of the slave trade seemed to go hand in hand.

Early in the second world war, EF 's brother Bertie wrote to a cousin in New York to ascertain that the family would welcome all of the English Farjeons should events in Europe make it sensible for them, as Jews, to flee. The answer was warmly positive, but in the event they all stayed put.

While Edith was recuperating in hospital in 1891, she was subjected to a nurse's unwanted advances. Her journal entries describe this woman's repeated sexual approaches: My experiences with Nurse are painful—she is under the possession of terrible fleshy love, [which] she does not conceive [of] as such, and as such I will not receive it. . . . She comes while I am resting, throws herself about me and kisses me with the persistence of madness: I manage to make her understand she grieves and fatigues me—instantly with repentance she retires to the arm-chair.

View reference

Field, Michael, and William Rothenstein. Works and Days. Editors Moore, Thomas Sturge and D. C. Sturge Moore, J. Murray, 1933.

63-4

FW 's later recollection of the moment when her aunt consented to release us from violence and insult by a removal from . . . [her] roof, suggests that FW and her sister were victims of some kind of child abuse. This may help to explain not only her anger toward her aunt, but also why the girls left their aunt's house before they were legally entitled to do so.