birth_date: 1883-07-10 00:00:00
avg_rating: 3.08
name: Lois Austen-Leigh
about: Lois Emma Austen-Leigh, the granddaughter of Jane Austen’s nephew and thus the great-great niece of Jane herself, was born and brought up in Winterbourne, Gloucester, on 10 July 1883. Her father was the Rector in the town. They later moved to Wargrave in Berkshire. While there Lois kept a diary and she had one unusual pastime in that she rode a motor-cycle wherever she went.	During the First World War, 1916-1918, she worked as a gardener for the Red Cross in Reading, while her sister, Honor, was a nurse in Malta and France. After the War, she became a companion to her widowed aunt. Then, after her aunt’s death in 1926, she had a house, Cob House built at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast for herself and her sister. Possibly this was financed a Lois Emma Austen-Leigh, the granddaughter of Jane Austen’s nephew and thus the great-great niece of Jane herself, was born and brought up in Winterbourne, Gloucester, on 10 July 1883. Her father was the Rector in the town. They later moved to Wargrave in Berkshire. While there Lois kept a diary and she had one unusual pastime in that she rode a motor-cycle wherever she went.	During the First World War, 1916-1918, she worked as a gardener for the Red Cross in Reading, while her sister, Honor, was a nurse in Malta and France. After the War, she became a companion to her widowed aunt. Then, after her aunt’s death in 1926, she had a house, Cob House built at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast for herself and her sister. Possibly this was financed an inheritance from her aunt.	She and her sister were an integral part of the Aldeburgh community with Benjamin Britten playing the piano on visits to their home and writer MR James was also a family friend. It was at Cob House, allegedly on the writing desk of her famous great, great-aunt used, that she wrote four mystery novels between 1931 and 1938.	The first of these The Incredible Crime was set in the university city of Cambridge, knowledge of which she had gathered when visiting her uncle [some state (erroneously) that it was her father] Augustus Austen-Leigh (1840-1905), who was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1889 to 1905. 	All four of her novels received good reviews, the first of which The Times Literary Supplement at the time of publication commented, ‘as a piece of writing and analysis of character the book is of a much higher order’, with ’some good pictures here of university life, some not too exaggerated portraits of childlike dons, and a real feeling for country life and sports’. The reviewer added, ‘Miss Austen-Leigh might consider a more serious vein of writing.’	Another contemporary reviewer called the author ‘something more than a writer of mystery stories. True, her plot is the very essence of mystery and her characters very clearly defined, but her work contains something more … Passages of unusual beauty constantly recur, especially in her descriptions of Cambridge and the coast of Suffolk.’	Despite all the critical acclaim, she would always say, ‘I only write to keep myself in champagne.’	After her fourth novel, the Second World War broke out and she and her sister worked for the emergency services throughout the duration. And although she lived for 23 years after the war, she did not write any more novels for the last 30 years of her life. Indeed, her work had been long forgotten until The Incredible Crime was republished in the British Library Crime Classics series in 2017.	She died in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on 14 February 1968. She left an estate of £43,969.Her crime novels were:The Incredible Crime (1931)Haunted Farm (1932) Rude Justice (1936) The Gobblecock Mystery (1938) ...more
death_date: 1968-02-14 00:00:00