The esteemed Madame Gilflurt hosted a Q&A on The Disappearance of Maria Glenn.
Maria Glenn’s story is not well known. How and where did you find her?
I was rooting around in the British Newspaper Archive, which has to be my favourite occupation, looking for stuff about the area in London where I live and came across a bizarre story about a young man who received an anonymous letter telling him that an heiress was willing to marry him if only he would only rescue her from a large house on the Clapham Road in south London, where she was being treated cruelly by her uncle. It turned out that the occupier of the house had also received an anonymous letter. It was a hoax. That set me thinking about elopement in the Georgian era – and how some people were happy to marry anyone, even a stranger, as long as they had money.
