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, "I am weary of civilisation." In another letter, she explained that "conventionality is not the question between us. . . . My whole life, you know, has been a protest against it, and in my relations with you it has never been brought to bear or
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