Culture March 16, 2010

Theresa Longworth, a middle-class English girl fresh from a convent school, met William Charles Yelverton, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, on a boat crossing the English Channel in 1852. She was nineteen, and he was a decade older. They talked all night on the open deck and then began a correspondence lasting five years, during which time Longworth served as a nurse in the Crimea. Her letters, which the whole world would soon be invited to read, were not the sort that usually dripped from the quills of Victorian women: “I have made up my mind to turn savage,” she told Yelverton,