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Le Faye collected letters by AustenDeirdre Le Faye’s quest to discover the
history of Jane Austen’s family started
in a north London graveyard in the
1970s. The young secretary, who
worked in the medieval department at
the British Museum, had joined the
Camden History Society and was sent
to catalogue gravestones at St John’s
church, Hampstead.
“I did a section on the left, going
down to the grave of John Constable
[the artist],” she told Jane Austen’s Re-
gency World magazine in 2014. “I came
across a stone that was almost indeci-
pherable, but... was able to find that it
marked the burials of Mrs Philadelphia
Hancock, Eliza Austen and Hastings de
Feuillide [all relations of the novelist].
That was the start.”
Yet nothing could answer why these
three came to be buried in Hampstead.
Turning to RW Chapman’s Jane Aus-
ten’s Letters (1932), Le Faye discovered
only that Austen’s brother Henry talks
of a drive to Hampstead. “I found out
more, read around it — but not much
— and what there was was wrong or in-
adequate,” she recalled.
She never did find the definitive an-
swer and always refused to speculate,
but it was to be the start of a lifelong
quest. “I got so interested from re-
searching the Austens that gradually I
realised I knew more about the family
than anyone else,” she said, adding that
much of the material she consulted was
“inadequate or inaccurate”.
At about the same time Le Faye dis-
covered that cheap holidays in the
countryside were available for those
willing to take part in archaeological
digs. This took her to Selborne, in
Hampshire, where, camping on site, she
helped to excavate the medieval priory
under the guidance of a classic anti-
quarian vicar known as Uncle George.
One summer afternoon she visited
the nearby village of Chawton and the
Burma. When they docked at Rangoon
he announced his early retirement, so
they immediately sailed back on the
same ship.
Leslie died in 1941, leaving the family,
in Austenian terms, ill provided for.
Deirdre was educated at the Abbey
School, Reading. She read Pride and
Prejudice, “but it didn’t register”, and
left before her 16th birthday, which she
described as no hardship: “Although I
always liked study and learning, I was
bored stiff with school.”
Her widowed mother felt that Smith
was too ordinary a name, while Lucov-
ich sounded too foreign in the postwar
years. Instead, Anne chose to be known
as Le Faye, an anglicised version of her
own mother’s maiden name. Deirdre,
still being under-age, changed with her.
She attended Denson secretarial col-
lege in South Kensington, west
London, and worked in administrative
positions for Canadian Pacific Railway
in Trafalgar Square, a firm of architects
and eventually the British Museum,where “the curators were amused by an
admin person actually writing”.
She never married, explaining that
“when I was of marriageable age, I
never met the right man; and when I
did, it was too late, our lives were too far
apart and we could only be ships that
pass in the night”.
After retiring from the museum in
1989 Le Faye remained living on the
edge of Hampstead, contemplating a
move to the Chawton area, but “the
house prices were too high”. Instead she
was a regular visitor to Hampshire, be-
coming a patron of Chawton House
Library and appearing on numerous
Austen-related radio and television
programmes. She settled instead in
Portishead, near Bristol, from where
her paternal grandparents had hailed,
living in a very un-Austenesque house
on a 20th-century housing estate.
Uncompromising to the point of
being intimidating, Le Faye had no
truck with those who made outlandish
claims for Austen, dismissing sugges-
tions, often by estate agents, that the
author had lived in certain houses. “It is
impudence to claim that she stayed
there,” she said, giving the example of a
pub at Petty France, north of Bath, that
is mentioned in Northanger Abbey.
However, she had no objection to
those Austen fans whose passion was
for Georgian dancing. “The froth and
nonsense and dressing up is great fun,”
she said, while declining to take part
herself. “If it brings them to the novels
then I can’t disagree with it. It’s a pity,
but how can you tell if it won’t turn into
something more substantial and might
bring people to do proper research,
which can be nothing but good.”Deirdre Le Faye, Austen scholar, was
born on October 26, 1933. She died of
motor neurone disease on August 16,
2020, aged 86the world: “If you don’t like the way I’m
livin’/ You just leave this long-haired
country boy alone.”
Yet his early association with hippy
counterculture was deceptive. At heart
Daniels was a traditional blue-collar
son of the Old South rooted in redneck
culture who enjoyed shooting and fish-
ing in the great outdoors.Deirdre Le Faye
Authority on Jane Austen who left school at 15 and became interested in the novelist after making a discovery in a graveyard
Charlie Daniels
Brash, bearded country singer and fiddler rooted in redneck culture who played with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen
In Charlie Daniels’ biggest hit,
a good ol’ boy from the Deep
South and the Devil go head to
head in a fiddle contest. The
duel plays out over Daniels’
blazing solos and the Devil is
defeated, of course, as our
heroic fiddler proclaims with
southern pride, “I done told you
once, you son of a bitch, I’m the
best there’s ever been.”
In the song, titled The Devil
Went Down to Georgia, the fid-
dler was named Johnny but it
was not hard to see him as Dan-
iels’ alter ego.
With its combination of light-
ning-fingered fiddle and
crunching rock riffs, the song
won a Grammy and Daniels per-
formed it in the John Travolta
film Urban Cowboy (1980), con-
tributing to a surge of main-
stream interest in country music.
A brash, bearded, larger-than-
life figure in a ten-gallon hat,
Daniels epitomised the robust
spirit of southern orneriness.
President Carter, a fellow south-
erner, invited Daniels and his
band to perform at his inauguration
ball in 1977.
Daniels’ music mixed country, blues,
bluegrass, rock, pop, swing and a rebel
yell on songs such as The South’s Gonna
Do It Again. On his 1975 hit single Long
Haired Country Boy he boasted he was
“stoned in the morning” and “drunk in
the afternoon”, extolled the virtues of
smoking marijuana and defiantly told
Many of his fans were natural
supporters of the populism of
Ronald Reagan and Donald
Trump and over the years he
shifted from writing songs such
as Long Haired Country Boy to
hits that satisfied his conserva-
tive base, with titles such as
(What This World Needs is) A
Few More Rednecks. In Simple
Man, another hit stridently
fashioned to chime with the
redneck sentiments of many of
his fans, he proposed lynching
drug dealers and feeding sex
offenders to the alligators.
He appeared in videos for
the National Rifle Association
and wrote a book titled Ain’t
No Rag: Freedom, Family and
the Flag. He also supported
President Bush over the Iraq
war in 2003.
“You people need to get out
of Hollywood once in a while
and get out into the real
world,” he wrote in an open
letter to the stars and celebri-
ties who opposed the con-
flict. “You’d be surprised at the hostility
you would find out here. Stop in at a
truck stop and tell an overworked, long-
distance truck driver that you don’t
think Saddam Hussein is doing any-
thing wrong.”
He emerged as one of country
music’s most outspokenly conservative
voices. A staunch believer in traditional
“family values” he was married for 56
years to Hazel (née Alexander) Daniels.She survives him, along with their
son, Charlie Daniels Jr, who is also a
musician.
He remained characteristically con-
troversial to the end. Two days before
his death he expressed a Trump-like
anger at the Black Lives Matter move-
ment. “You may tear down statues and
burn buildings but you can’t kill the
spirit of patriots and when they’ve had
enough this madness will end,” he
wrote.
Charles Edward Daniels was born in
1936 in Wilmington, North Carolina,
the son of LaRue (née Hammonds), a
stay-at-home mother, and Bill Daniels,
a lumberjack who played fiddle and
guitar. His son followed in his footsteps
and learnt to play both instruments in
school. He also added banjo and man-
dolin to his repertoire.
By the late 1950s he had formed a
band called the Jaguars and his first sig-
nificant success as a songwriter came
with It Hurts Me, which was recorded by
Elvis Presley as the B-side of his 1964
hit Kissin’ Cousins.
By the end of 1967 he had disbanded
the Jaguars and moved to Nashville at
the behest of the producer Bob John-
ston, whose wife Joy Byers had been
Daniels’ co-writer on It Hurts Me.
He arrived with $20 in his pocket. “I
didn’t fit the Nashville type very well,”
he observed. “I’d come out of 12 years of
playing bang-slang, balls-to-the-wall
music in clubs, and I played too loud
and too bluesy.”
Johnston delivered on the lucrative
session work he had promised andwithin a year Daniels was playing on al-
bums by Leonard Cohen (Songs of Love
and Hate) and Bob Dylan (Nashville
Skyline). “I felt I had a lot in common
with Charlie,” Dylan wrote in his 2004
memoir Chronicles Volume One. “When
he was around, something good would
usually come out of the sessions.”
Daniels also played on Ringo Starr’s
Nashville-recorded album Beaucoups
of Blues (1970). There was another Beat-
les tie-up when Daniels played on a
joint Dylan-George Harrison session
that same year.
His debut solo album was released in
1970 and over the next three decades
Daniels scored more than two dozen
singles on the country chart, as well as
finding pop and rock crossover success.
He toured tirelessly with the Charlie
Daniels Band, playing up to 250 gigs a
year. He claimed you could name any
town in America and he had played
there. He also entertained American
forces overseas, including in the con-
flict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Asked if he had a favourite place to
play, he considered the grand venues
where he had performed, from the
Grand Ole Opry to Carnegie Hall.
Then in his gruff drawl he answered:
“Anywhere with a good crowd, and a
good paycheck.”Charlie Daniels, country musician, was
born on October 28, 1936. He died of a
stroke on July 6, 2020, aged 83s R T s a h t ( F Mfa
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Daniels played up to 250 gigs a year flit“Y ’dSCOTT WEINER/MEDIAPUNCH[email protected]copy information from books previous-
ly called up from the library. By 8am she
was at her desk, ostensibly focusing on
official duties, and at 4pm would go
straight to the Reading Room. Some-
times the museum’s director would call
by and declare, to her amusement, that
she was the only one who did any work.
In 1989 the British Library published
Le Faye’s Jane Austen: A Family Record,
which came to be regarded as the defin-
itive biography of the novelist. David
Gilson, the Austen bibliographer, had
been due to produce a new edition of
the Letters, but passed the task to Le
Faye who, demonstrating
her tenacity and attention
to detail, published them
with Oxford University
Press in 1995.
Her position as the
authority on all things
Austen duly established,
Le Faye continued to work
on papers, articles and
books, including The Jane
Austen Cookbook (1995,
with Maggie Black), a se-
lection of recipes from a
manuscript book that the
Austen family would have
used, and Jane Austen’s Coun-
try Life (2014), which shifts the empha-
sis of Austen from being the daughter of
a clergyman to that of a farmer.
Deirdre Gillian Gina Smith was born
in Bournemouth in 1933, the daughter
of Leslie Smith, from Somerset yeo-
manry stock, who was with the Indian
forestry service in Burma, and his
Egyptian-born wife, Anne (née Lucov-
ich). An elder brother, Kenneth, was
called to the Bar, never practised and
died in 2001.
Anne had been dispatched to En-
gland for the birth of her daughter and
two years later mother and child sailed
on the Emperor of India to join Leslie incottage where Austen had once lived.
“The house was then only partly open,
as some sitting tenants were still in resi-
dence,” she said, recalling the Jane Aus-
ten Society’s early attempts to run it as
a museum. “I remember a cross old vil-
lage wife taking sixpences at the door
and grumbling about the waste of a
good house.”
Although Le Faye had previously
been only mildly interested in Austen,
these events combined to ignite a
flame. She made contact with as many
descendants of the author’s family as
possible, eventually coming across a
branch of the family near
Winchester whose archive
was stored in trunks in the
attic. “So a pattern was es-
tablished,” she recalled. “I
would come down from
London at the weekend,
have tea with the owners,
and then be permitted to
roam freely in the attic.”
Over five years she sorted,
classified and copied their
papers. She also found in the
family’s bookcase a 1913 Aus-
ten biography stuffed with
additional papers and let-
ters. She visited museums,
libraries and archives, reading letters
both published and unpublished andexamining memoirs, journals, diaries,
parish registers, banking ledgers, naval
logbooks, taxation records and wills.
Working in the British Museum, then
under the same roof as the British Li-
brary, was an invaluable help. She
would arrive every morning at 7.15 andShe read Pride and
Prejudice in lessons
‘but it didn’t register’
h t w P a A L o b A wle
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