A little while before ten o’clock on the evening of Sunday 14 April 1878, a closed carriage drew up outside Tavistock House, an imposing, if somewhat run-down, Georgian mansion in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury. Shortly afterwards the doorbell rang and a man's voice was heard, demanding admission. He wanted, he said, to see Mrs Weldon, the mistress of the house. Anticipating trouble, the manservant kept the chain on when he opened the door. There stood a man and two women: a madhouse keeper and two nurses. They had been sent, under an order signed by Mrs Weldon's estranged husband, to carry her off to a private lunatic asylum. The three visitors tried first to force, and then to bribe, their way into the house, but the servant managed to close the door and they went away empty-handed. The events that led to this dramatic scene, and its far-reaching consequences, form the framework of this book.

Georgina Weldon was born a month before Queen Victoria came to the throne; she died when Victoria's grandson, George V, was king. These years, from 1837 to 1914, were a time of unprecedented change. When Georgina and her family travelled from Florence to Lake Constance in 1854, the railway only took them as far as Pisa; the rest of the journey was accomplished by means of horse-drawn carriages and a steamboat. In the early twentieth century Georgina used motor buses, cars and taxis, and marvelled at the exploits of the early aviators. She was born three years before the introduction of Rowland Hill's Uniform Penny Post; in old age she occasionally used the telephone.