Jane Austen French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life. During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of "Elinor and Marianne", Austen began writing a third novel with the working title "Susan" – later "Northanger Abbey" – a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early
The Whirlpool (Jane Urquhart novel) experience of loss at such a young age shaped Urquhart's writing, particularly "The Whirlpool", whose protagonist, Fleda, is similarly a young widow. "I think the fact that Paul died when he did, when we were both so young, allowed me to remember what it was like to experience such a devastating loss early in life, as my characters do in this book," she explains. The Whirlpool (Jane Urquhart novel) The Whirlpool, originally published in Toronto by McClelland and Stewart in 1986, is Canadian author Jane Urquhart's first novel. It was subsequently published in the United Kingdom by Simon and Schuster,