In February 1897, a thirty-six-year-old mother from north London sat in front of two doctors and told them she had been transformed into Satan, that she had twice been in hell, and that for her there was no hope and no salvation. The doctors wrote down every word.

Her name was Bess Harvey. The records catch her shaping silk and ribbon as a Willesden milliner beside her sisters, marrying a law clerk named Henry, and nursing her little boy through scarlet fever, night after night, alone — he survived, and she never recovered. Bethlem, then Holloway, then St Luke's; she died there in January 1900, aged thirty-nine, and no newspaper carried a word of it.

This is her story, told through the records she left behind.