Just as well, for Austen attracts as much dissent as love. She never shrank from controversy and relished a good fight. Her publications, well-thumbed, worn, and indispensable, fill our bookshelves we consult them daily. In her last months, Deirdre was working on a fifth edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, now in preparation with Oxford University Press.

Who is to say what might not be turned to use? Not only might Jane Austen be tracked moment by moment through its pages but here’s the place to learn on which date the waste pool at Chawton Cottage was cleaned, who drank tea with whom and when, and the price of James Austen’s ‘scotch bedside carpets’. From it, further publications emerged: among which A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family (2006). We disagreed at our peril! And yet, she was ever generous to share her findings and to assist even the most novice among us who knocked at her door.ĭeirdre’s ever-expanding card-index of informative facts will go down in scholarly legend. She took seriously the responsibility she believed her searches entailed, ruthlessly exposing myths and celebrating the ‘facts’ as she saw them. Deirdre’s enthusiasm for hunting down evidence was tireless: nothing was too small or too insignificant any and every detail might illuminate an obscure corner of Jane Austen’s life any small matter might be made to matter. A Family Record, the Le Faye Austen biography (revised again in 2004), is the outgrowth of Austen family-authored biographies dating back through several generations of the Austen-Leighs as far as 1870 it is consulted as a sacred sourcebook, the biographer’s biography. She was, she later wrote, determined to find out ‘anything and everything which has any kind of bearing upon the life of Jane Austen and her family’ ( Jane Austen.

So the adventure into Austen family genealogy began. In a Hampstead churchyard, she discovered the graves of Jane Austen’s Aunt Hancock, her daughter Eliza de Feuillide, and Eliza’s young son, all three in the same plot. Living in London and working as an administrator in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities at the British Museum, Deirdre developed an interest in local history, spending her spare time exploring the architecture of her patch of North London.

But at this early stage the coincidence did not spark an enthusiasm for Austen’s novels by her own admission, Deirdre came to enjoy Jane Austen rather late. She was a scholarship pupil at the famous Abbey School, Reading, where Jane Austen, too, had briefly been educated. She was born in Bournemouth, on the fringes of Austen country.

In retrospect, Deirdre’s beginnings marked her for her future role as Austen sleuth par excellence.

Jane Austen by Deirdre Le Faye