In 1856, Martha Brown was hanged for the 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. Writing many years later, he said: ‘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, one of a large family, was an ordinary woman of humble parentage, her father an itinerant dairyman. Very little is known about her tragic life, and she remains tantalising and elusive. It is not whether or not she did kill her husband that intrigues so much as the mystery of her origins, the tragic circumstances of her life, the injustice of her rushed trial and subsequent execution.