Brilliana, Lady Harley

Brilliana Harley was an English gentlewoman and prolific letter writer whose correspondence is an important source for domestic and political life before and during the English Civil War. A committed Puritan, she was married to the parliamentarian politician Sir Robert Harley.

In 1643 she directed the defence of the family seat at Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire during a royalist siege, organising supplies and maintaining the garrison while her husband was away. She died later that year, shortly before the house faced a second and more destructive siege.

Anne O’Brien’s Marriage Under Siege makes Brilliana Harley’s defence of Brampton Bryan Castle the central historical crisis of the novel. With Sir Robert Harley away in London, Brilliana organises supplies, fortifications and the household’s resistance as Royalist forces close around the estate. O’Brien romanticises parts of the marriage and adjusts chronology for the fiction, but the physical hardship, political isolation and determination attributed to Brilliana draw directly on the remarkable letters she wrote during the siege.