Do NOT underestimate Eliza de Feullide!

There is a consensus among Jane Austen commentators that Eliza de Feullide was a mental lightweight, an airhead; "vain and frivolous" and "giddy" are adjectives I have seen. What a sad failure of critical judgement that is! A woman who - risking the guillotine - bluffed her way out of Revolutionary France, with a lame-duck English husband in tow! An assignment worthy of James Bond himself. She had something more than luck going for her. If she could make Jane Austen love her too, she must have had even more going for her.

Jane Austen didn't like people easily. She definitely had NO time for airheads or moral degenerates. She set the bar of friendship high. To qualify, you had to be "rational" (one of her favourite words) - grounded, sensible, clear-thinking. You also had to be intelligent, well-informed, and interesting; and of course, a highly-developed sense of moral values was essential.

That Jane Austen loved her so well is all the evidence we need that Eliza possessed these qualities in abundance. She did indeed love the social whirl; not because she was dizzy, but because it was FUN. She was an incorrigible flirt; not because she was flighty, but because it was FUN. To confuse flighty behaviour with character is a common mistake.

In their love of flirting and good company, Jane and Eliza were so much alike. They probably shared many a giggly secret together, after the ball. But within the Austen family there is never so much as a whisper that Eliza was immoral. Jane, particularly, prided herself on her ability to "sniff" an adulterer; had she suspected Eliza, her brother's wife, she would not have countenanced friendship for a second.

There was nothing giddy or superficial about Eliza. She had known terror and tragedy. To what extent her personality was driven by post-traumatic stress disorder, or a wanderer's need to fit in, or both, is an interesting question. We do not know what dreadful sufferings she may have revealed to Jane, in private conversation. We do not know what final words she spoke to Jane, whose hand was the only hand she wanted to hold as she lay dying. We do know that she was an independent-minded, "liberated" woman, and the loving mother of a handicapped child; a female dynamo who loved life, but gambled her life to save her husband a jail term. Her story is the stuff of novels. What a crazy diamond of a woman she was! And Jane Austen loved her.