“I have no friends or family here and in addition to all the pain I have endured here, I feel like I am abandoned and forgotten, that after so many times of asking my embassy, I still have no money at all to endure all of this.”

The letters, addressed to three Iranian officials, are believed to have been written in Persian between June and December 2019, before being smuggled out of the jail by an intermediary and published by The Times of London and The Guardian.

Ms. Moore-Gilbert accused the Revolutionary Guards of “playing an awful game with me.”

“I’m taking psychiatric medications, but these 10 months that I have spent here have gravely damaged my mental health,” Ms. Moore-Gilbert wrote in a letter dated July 2019. “I am still denied phone calls and visitations, and I am afraid that my mental and emotional state may further deteriorate if I remain in this extremely restrictive detention ward.”

The letters were revealed at a time when the already strained relationship between Iran and the West has drastically deteriorated, after the American killing of an Iranian general and subsequent retaliatory strikes from Iran. Ms. Moore-Gilbert is just one of several Westerners and dual nationals being held in Iranian prisons on charges that their families and officials say are unfounded.

Image Kylie Moore-Gilbert Credit... Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, via Shutterstock

Ms. Moore-Gilbert, a Cambridge-educated professor in Islamic studies at the University of Melbourne, denies the charges against her, as do her colleagues and family. She is being held at the same notorious Tehran prison as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian arrested in 2016 and charged with espionage.