From 1819, when Robert and Henrietta Liston were still in post at the British Embassy in Constantinople, Robert, then seventy-six years old, began to experience ‘almost daily visitations of spectral figures’ – figures in Turkish, Greek and ancient Roman clothing and in ‘the old-fashioned Scottish tartan’ worn in his youth (Craig 1836: 335). The visitations continued intermittently until his death at ninety-four in 1836; Robert's last years were lived without Henrietta who died aged seventy-seven in 1828. A particularly remarkable illusion was recounted in The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal by his physician Dr James Craig. Robert had seen Henrietta,

Shadowy presences, briefly observed before slipping out of the documentary record, eighteenth-century women and their histories, biographies and inner lives remain under-represented in private and official archives and difficult to recover. Henrietta, however, becomes atypically visible to us through the Sir Robert Liston Papers – the extensive archive that bears her husband's name.

After the hallucinatory appearance of Henrietta, Dr Craig ventured to ask Robert about his visions. Robert answered only ‘magnifique, and sometimes not so brilliant’ (Ibid.: 344), an almost perfect description of the vision of Henrietta conjured by the Liston Papers. Our vision of ‘Ambasciatrice Liston’ is detailed and lucid. Hundreds of documents from her married life bear witness to her thoughts, choices and relationships as she travelled and worked with her husband. ‘Her Excellency’, later ‘Lady Liston’, emerges from the archive in magnificent clarity. Of Miss Marchant, however, the middle-class orphan from the British colony of Antigua, affectionately known as ‘Henny’, our view is indeed not so brilliant. A handful of her letters, a holograph will and a few childhood memories recalled in her 1801 West Indies travelogue are almost all the surviving traces of the first forty-five years of her life.