Name Theresa Yelverton | Died September 13, 1881 | |
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Books Zanita: A Tale of the Yo-semite, Teresina in America | ||
Theresa Yelverton (1833 — 13 September 1881) was an English woman who became notorious because of her involvement in the Yelverton case, a 19th-century Irish law case, which eventually resulted in a change to the law on mixed religion marriages in Ireland.
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Life
She was born Maria Theresa Longworth in 1833 in Cheetwood, Manchester, Lancashire, England. After meeting Major William Charles Yelverton, Viscount Avonmore on a steamer in August 1852, falling in love with him, and pursuing him for several years, she claimed to have married him secretly in on 15 August 1857 at Rostrevor, County Down, Ireland, and to have earned the title Therese Yelverton, Viscountess Avonmore. She was a nurse in 1857 in Galata, Russia during the Crimean War.
However, the Viscount remarried within the year, bringing about a series of trials (most notably, Thelwall v. Yelverton, between 21 February 1861 and 4 March 1861) during the course of which he allegedly used his influence with the House of Lords to annul his first marriage. The case brought notoriety and created very mixed feelings. "Theresa was alternately vilified and celebrated, portrayed as a victim who had been 'mercilessly abandoned' and accused of being a lascivious seducer. Sometimes she was depicted as innocent and pure, at others as a ruthless social climber. After six years of trials and appeals, she finally lost her case. In the process, however, she had become a minor celebrity."
Afterwards, she led an itinerant life and supported herself by writing about her travels. Francis Farquhar wrote that she "spent the summer of 1870 in Yosemite, where she attached herself to the Hutchings family and made eyes at John Muir. He escaped to the woods, but not before she had noted enough of his conversation and his ways of life to make him over into Kenmuir, the hero of her novel."
Death
She died in 1881 in Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa.