Two hundred years ago this month, an ailing Jane Austen gathered the energy to pen the last letter she would ever send from her cottage in rural Hampshire. She professed her “tender” feelings for the recipient, her dear friend and fellow writer Anne Sharp, proclaiming herself forever “attached”. But the extraordinary woman who Austen singled out for this prolonged and affectionate farewell of May 1817 is little known today.

Historian Lucy Worsley suggested this week that although Austen almost certainly never slept with a man, she may instead have slept with a woman. We know not if her relations with Sharp were anything more than platonic, but either way, the obscurity of the latter is just as Austen’s relatives would have wished it. While the great novelist considered her correspondent a most treasured confidante, Austen’s family took a very different view of Anne. For this woman was a member of the servant class. Indeed, she’d worked for the Austens themselves – as a governess to Jane’s niece.