A painstaking compilation of intimate family letters bringing voices from Bermuda’s past to the page will be launched next week at the Bermuda Historical Society headquarters.

Opened Letters, Opened Lives gathers select letters between members of the Hollis family of Bailey’s Bay that spanned from 1839 to 1883.

The collection, complete with a family album, was a labour of love for historian John Cox.

The author of several works of Bermudian history has dedicated his latest publication to the granddaughter of the couple whose letters stand as the book’s centrepiece.

The collection opens a window into Victorian-era Bermuda, from hurricanes to epidemics, at a time when Hamilton was the newly designated capital, the Causeway was under construction and St George’s bustled with blockade runners during the American Civil War.

Mr Cox, who first saw the transcriptions in 1978 before he was loaned the collection several years ago, said he was “blown away” reading them.

“I just thought, wow, these are amazing — these have got to be published,” he said.

“It’s a very intimate history. Their voices got so deep into my head that I dreamt of them; they were part of my life. You almost feel like they’re walking through the room.”

Kathleen Caffee Dickinson, the granddaughter of seafarer Henry Hilgrove Hollis and Louisa Jane Wilkinson Hollis, began the laborious transcription in 1960 after the trove of documents was discovered in a drawer at the family home of Hilgrove.

Her daughter, Linda Dickinson Brown, helped with the project, and in 1993 the collection was donated to the Bermuda Archives, where the originals can be viewed by the public.

Ms Dickinson, who coined the title for the book, had tried for many years to find a publisher in the United States, but without success.

Mr Cox said that after her death in 1992, her daughter eventually handed the project over to him, remembering how much the historian had enjoyed poring over the collection.

“I started reading them again and I was enraptured,” he said. “It’s been nearly three years of work.”

The compilation, which will be on sale in bookshops after the launch on Tuesday, contained about one third of the letters.

Mr Cox selected “the ones I thought would be most interesting, have the most impact”.

He added: “There’s nothing stilted in the voices. It could be almost any time — it’s like they bring their time into ours.”

The story begins with Henry Hilgrove Hollis and Louisa Jane Wilkinson growing up in Bailey's Bay, six years apart.

When the teenaged Henry went to sea as a mate on the Bermuda schooner Lark, his mother, Mary, pressed a series of young people to write to him, Louisa Jane among them.

An 1856 letter from Louisa tells him: “Since you went away we have been almost frightened out of our wits.

“Yellow Jack [yellow fever] has hoisted its colours all over Bermuda, and a few have surrendered to him, but I hope you will find enough to welcome you home.”

A stream of letters before and after their marriage goes on to chronicle the couple's devotion, along with the travails of life in 19th-century Bermuda.

After the two marry, Louisa writes to Henry, who is at sea while she is pregnant with their first child, desperate to see him again and struggling through a difficult pregnancy.

In 1865, more letters chronicle her brush with death from scarlet fever, which claims the life of her sister, Kate.

Mr Cox said he found the harrowing description particularly poignant.

“There’s a lot of tragedy that they face,” he said. “It’s hard, but it’s riveting.

“You really feel it. Ultimately she lives through it — you can bear it because the heroine lives.”

Mr Cox said the island was deeply fortunate to have inherited the letters when “’roaches, damp and humidity could have just destroyed them”.

He added: “I think they’re the most amazing letters written in the whole of the 19th century in Bermuda.”

Mr Cox credited Ms Dickinson for her dedication to the project.

“What a wonderful woman,” he said. “She had such energy to her. My job has been easy by comparison.”

In 1883, the book’s final letter captures the visit to Bermuda by Princess Louise, the sixth child of Queen Victoria.

By choosing the island as her winter retreat, calling it “a place of eternal spring”, she launched the island’s reputation for tourism.

Louisa Hollis, writing to her husband in London, reports: “Because of the Princess’s praise of Bermuda, the visitors are flocking here.

“There were 81 on the Orinoco on Sunday. Some had to sleep on board that night as they could not find accommodations.”

The letter closes: “One day you will surely come home to me and not go back to sea. What a happy day that will be for us.

“This has been a hard life, in many ways, but I should not have given it up for anything, especially to be by your side, dearest husband.”

Mr Cox said the impact of the compilation was evident when he shared a copy with a friend in Canada last week.

“She told me, ‘I feel like I know these people’,” he said, and described himself as “slightly overwhelmed” to be finished.

• Opened Letters, Opened Lives will be available for $30 from 10am to 2pm at the Bermuda Historical Society Museum on Queen Street in Hamilton. It then goes on sale in bookstores for $35, with one third of proceeds supporting the museum