![]() ![]() ![]() The curate then was Richard Harries, later Bishop of Oxford, who became a lifelong friend and supporter.ĭeirdre Le Faye was not only an expert on the author, but was also unrivalled in her knowledge of the Austen canon. ![]() “People had suddenly woken up to incumbents ‘tidying up’ churchyards,” she explained. She gave short shrift, for example, to claims that the so-called “Rice portrait”, a hotly disputed painting by Ozias Humphry, depicted Austen, while one historian who suggested that the author had walked in his parish was dismissed as “trying to claim some JA-interest in his own little potato patch”.ĭeirdre Le Faye began pursuing Austen’s life and legacy in the 1970s, when, as a member of the Camden History Society, she was recording gravestones at the parish church of St John-at-Hampstead. Deirdre Le Faye, who has died aged 86, was the leading biographer of Jane Austen, searching with energy, tenacity and enthusiasm through family archives, parish registers, banking ledgers, wills, diaries, memoirs and journals for every possible scrap of information about the 19th-century novelist and her extended family.Īn independent scholar, she was an amiable yet formidable presence in the world of Jane Austen studies, known as a no-nonsense stickler for accuracy who abhorred speculation. ![]()
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