Harvard Student’s Love Story Endures Beyond Grave (and Archives)

A Neat NYTimes Piece takes a look at Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Harvard class of 1859, and his diary.

Brian A. Sullivan was working as Harvard’s senior reference archivist when he randomly pulled down a box of 19th-century student journals and was left spellbound by an extraordinarily vivid love story.

“My noble, darling wife,” he wrote on Aug. 3 from Cambridge, where he was in his first year at Harvard Divinity School. “Oh, how my soul is rent with fear and anguish for you, poor childless mother!”