Jane Austen's 'outlandish cousin' - Deirdre Le Faye

Eliza de Feuillide is best known as the spirited first cousin of Jane Austen whose colourful life and travels are recounted through her extensive correspondence with Jane, the Austen family, and other friends and relatives. Born in Calcutta in 1761, she spent an impecunious childhood in England and then France, where she married an aristocratic French Officer and lived through the Revolution, surviving her husband, who was guillotined in 1794. Many of Eliza's letters vividly illuminate the lives of Jane Austen and her family, as well as revealing the wider world against which Austen's novels are set. The letters were never intended for publication and are all the more revealing for being long before Jane became a well-known authoress.This new biography collects all the surviving letters, providing many valuable new insights into the background to Jane Austen's novels as well as being a highly entertaining social and historical record in its own right.