Ann de St Quintin

FAR was taught until she was about eighteen by her schoolmistress aunt Arabella . In 1792 she was enrolled as a boarder at the Abbey School in Reading, where Jane Austen had spent a...

Mitford introduced St Quintin and his wife to her life-story as a well-born, well-educated, and well-looking French emigrant, and a woman whom she thought French, good-natured, red-faced . . . much muffled up in shawls...

FAR closed her school at 22 Hans Place, London, and moved to Paris, apparently to rejoin Dominique de St Quintin , who had settled there with his wife a couple of years before.

The first canto was drafted by 7 February 1809, when Mary Russell Mitford read it and hoped it would extend to a second canto. She read its praise of a male friend as sweet as...