Martha Brown (murderer)

Elizabeth Martha Brown (died August 9, 1856) was the last woman to be hanged in public in Dorset, England. She was executed outside Dorchester Prison after being convicted of the murder of her husband, John. The prosecution said that she had attacked him with an axe after he had taken a whip to her.

Among the crowd of 3,000–4,000 who watched the hanging was the English novelist, Thomas Hardy, 16 years old at the time, standing close to the gallows. He wrote 70 years later that he was ashamed to have there. Brown was dressed in a long, black, silk dress. A cloth was placed over her face, but as it began to rain, her face became visible again. Hardy wrote, "I saw—they had put a cloth over the face—how, as the cloth got wet, her features came through it. That was extraordinary." "I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain," he wrote elsewhere, "and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back." Blake Morrison writes that the hanging of Tess in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) reflected his experience of watching Brown's death.

References

• Millgate, Michael (2006). Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199275661, 9780199275663
• Morrison, Blake (2008). 'What a fine figure she showed as she hung in the misty rain', The Guardian, August 2, 2008.

Further reading

• Dorset Echo (2000). The Mystery of Martha Brown, November 11, 2000.
• Thorne, Nicola (2000). My Name is Martha Brown. Harper Collins.