I got to know her well because of her constant devotion to the Chawton House Library project, and support of me, personally, in a variety of my roles there. I first met Deirdre in 2005, when I took up my position as postdoctoral research fellow at Chawton House and the University of Southampton.

But on this, as on many, many other things, she and I agreed to differ. I knew not how to reconcile Deirdre’s very different account of what she did to what I felt was the work of biography. It was cited in the conferment speech made at the graduation ceremony for her honorary Doctorate, which can be read here. The phrase ‘facts as crisp as lettuce leaves’ was one she herself used, on many occasions. What of the gaps, the omissions, what of providing a reading of tone and style? “I deal in facts”, Deirdre said. Surely, I said, there’s a great deal of invention in biography, and perhaps even in editing? Leaving aside the destruction of Austen’s letters, and the necessary account that must be made of what’s missing, what’s there still needs to be interpreted. We were sitting in the Great Hall at Chawton House, and I was quizzing Deirdre about her rejection of what she always called ‘lit crit’ (she could load the phrase with a great deal of disdain). No matter: I remember our discussion vividly. It was certainly before her honorary doctorate, awarded at the University of Southampton in 2011. It must have been after the publication of the Cambridge University Press edition of Northanger Abbey, which she co-edited with Barbara Benedict, and which appeared in 2006, because we were talking about her work on that. I can’t remember exactly when I talked about this passage with Deirdre Le Faye, who has died age 86. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.

Deirdre le faye