Mary Martha Sherwood 1775-1851 Best known for The Fairchild Family (1818), in which Mr. Fairchild horrifies modern readers when he takes his quarrelling children to see the decaying hanging corpse of a man who had killed his brother.  The murderer's story began with childhood quarrels, the children are reminded.  The story was extremely influential in the nineteenth century. The strongly moral element in her books might be set against her childhood experience of education, involving doing her schoolwork while shackled  with an iron collar to a backboard.  When freed at the end of the day, she would run for half a mile in the woods. Sherwood, born Mary Martha Butt, was the sister of another children's author, Lucy Cameron.

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