Gaoler's Daughter

... Now the gaoler had a daughter, a pleasant wench and good-hearted, who assisted her father in the lighter duties of his post. She was particularly fond of animals, and, besides her canary, whose cage hung on a nail in the massive wall of the keep by day, to the great annoyance of prisoners who relished an after dinner nap, and was shrouded in an antimacassar on the parlour table at night, she kept several piebald mice and a restless revolving squirrel. This kind-hearted girl, pitying the misery of Toad, said to her father one day, `Father! I can't bear to see that poor beast so unhappy, and getting so thin! You let me have the managing of him. You know how fond of animals I am. I'll make him eat from my hand, and sit up, and do all sorts of things.'

A native of East Yorkshire, England, Anna Maxwell Martin starred in Masterpiece Theatre's Bleak House as Esther Summerson, a role for which she won the BAFTA Best Actress Award. She has appeared in the films Becoming Jane (as Cassandra Austen) and Enduring Love, the stage production of His Dark Materials, and she played Daphne Manners in Radio 4's adaptation of The Jewel In The Crown.

In 2004, she played Bessie Higgins in North & South, voted the top drama of the year by BBC viewers.