Wimpole Street, London
September 1834

Autumn comes, and those first chill winds bring with them a downturn in my mother’s health. Or so she claims. Wanting more regular access to her doctors, Mamma decides to move the household temporarily from Ealing to Wimpole Street, right in the heart of London. Knowing that Mamma is concerned about my health – which she seems to view as an extension of her own, for the most part, unable to imagine me to be well when she herself is feeling unwell – I have gone to some lengths to persuade her that I am perfectly well. But this isn’t true, and I don’t know if I am really able to pretend anything to the contrary.

The prayer-book preys on my thoughts: I am sure that Mamma has lied to me about many things concerning my father, and she has deprived me of getting to know his relations. She has shrouded the whole of their marriage in such a cloud of secrecy that I can only believe that she behaved very badly indeed towards him. Sometimes, I decide that she hated him, and that, perhaps, by extension, she hates me...

Does that not explain almost every action she has ever taken? The long absences when I was an infant... The lessons that I was subject to from an early age; the harsh punishments and grudging rewards; the cold smiles and closed-down conversations... The Furies who watched my every move... The love affair they put a stop to with no thought at all for my feelings or desires... The way my mother always tried to change the way my brain worked – the people she enlisted to help her do so! Miss Stamp, and Dr King, and Mr Frend... those constant efforts to trammel, and organise, and contain... writing to Mr Murray to make sure that I could never publish a book...

It is making me ill, and I know that it is making me ill, and yet I cannot stop thinking about it all. I feel like Pandora, who lifted the lid so innocently on a chest full of evils and watched in helpless horror as they crawled out into the world. Despite an outward calm that I force myself to present – I do not want the attention of any of her physicians – I am ablaze with inward noise, a storm cloud of ill-contained feeling. I wake with headaches that remind me of my early childhood – hard slices of pain that seem to cleave my head in half. On occasion, I open a book and try to read, then realise that I cannot see the words because they have melted into a messy triplicate. I sleep badly. The summer-soft contentedness of the Buxton hotel seems to belong to a very distant past.