Ashford

A Kent market town where Simone Weil, weakened by tuberculosis and by her own refusal to eat more than occupied France's wartime rations, died in a sanatorium in 1943 at thirty-four.

Ashford was a Kent market town with a sanatorium, and Weil was moved there in 1943 with tuberculosis. She had worked in a factory to share the condition of workers, spent a short time at the front in Spain, and by then refused to eat more than she believed people in occupied France were getting. The coroner recorded that she had killed herself while the balance of her mind was disturbed, a verdict her friends disputed and her writing does not support. She was thirty-four.