While there is no mention of her faith, this obit details the very interesting life of a humble, sensible woman, and in turn points to other singular women about whom she wrote:
Throughout most of her husband's political career, Edna Healey devoted herself to raising the Healeys' three children and supporting her husband in his career. But after her children had grown up she made an independent career for herself as a historian and biographer.
Her first book, Lady Unknown (1978), was a biography of Angela Burdett-Coutts, the richest heiress in Victorian Britain who, after inheriting a fortune and the family bank at the age of 23, devoted her life to a great number of good causes. She became friend and patroness to numerous 19th-century intellectual and political luminaries, including the ageing Duke of Wellington (to whom she proposed marriage) and Charles Dickens, with whom she became involved in schemes to rescue child prostitutes and founded a home for fallen women.
Among others, she later wrote about Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx and Emma Darwin. I may look up Mrs Healey's books when I get a moment, and am grateful to know that she found a way to live in the fishbowl of public life without it consuming her or her family. RIP, dear sister.
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