LAURA TENNANT and Mary Wyndham met in the early spring of 1882 in Hyères, a small resort town in south-east France that had been the most popular Mediterranean retreat among the British aristocracy for more than a century. Daughters respectively of a fabulously wealthy Scottish industrialist and a Wiltshire gentry- aristocrat, Laura and Mary were there to build up their endurance for the London Season marriage market that they would be entering when they returned home. Hyères was a safe and relaxed place ‘to learn to be self-sufficient and not depend on others in little things’, Mary's father wrote to her. ‘One must learn to manage when with indifferent, if not hostile people – this is hard for girls who do not leave home until married.’ Laura and Mary were both nineteen, and they were facing the most important period of decision-making in their young lives. Marriage formed one part of a man's life narrative, a supplement to political or professional achievements. For a woman it was the dominating reality – the fundamental choice in this pre-divorce era that would define her subsequent existence and contributions to the world.

Three years later, when Laura was safely engaged, she described this period of her life as ‘volcanic’. For prosperous Victorian families, female adolescence was fraught with peril as girls abandoned the innocent romping of childhood, disciplined themselves into the ‘social demeanors’ of respectability and sought the husband who would focus their adult responsibilities. Victorian diaries and novels chronicled the emotional roller-coaster that girls experienced: feelings of entrapment within boundaries defined by others, the irritating passivity of waiting to find out how it would all turn out, fear of being judged as improperly female or too ambitious, and the inadequacy of religious consolations. ‘However much I glory and love being a woman I have come to the sad conclusion after much thinking – that it is very hard being a girl’, Laura wrote in the journal she had been keeping since she was thirteen: