Jane Austen’s Outlandish Cousin

Eliza de Feuillide is best known as the spirited first cousin of Jane Austen, whose colourful life and travels are recounted here through her extensive correspondence with Jane, the Austen family and other friends and relatives.
Born in Calcutta in 1761, her father was a surgeon with the East India Company, and a colleague of Warren Hastings (who was to remain a friend of the family throughout Eliza's life).  Eliza spent most of her childhood in England but after her father's death in 1775, she and her mother moved to Paris where Eliza wrote regularly to her family in England with details of her social life, Paris fashions, and the parties she attended at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  She married an aristocratic French officer and lived through the Revolution, surviving her husband who was guillotined in 1794.