Flora Fraser is the author of George & Martha Washington: A Revolutionary Marriage (Bloomsbury, 2015), among a number of other historical books including Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Venus of Empire: The Life of Pauline Bonaparte (John Murray, 2009).
Who was Martha Washington?
George Washington’s future wife Martha, born in 1731, was the eldest child of John Dandridge, a tobacco planter and courthouse clerk in southern Virginia. Martha and her siblings grew up on the Pamunkey River, where their father farmed 500 acres, in modest surroundings. The fortunes of Washington’s future wife changed,
