A plot that Jane Austen herself might have contrived: the story of Rose de Freycinet – Suzanne Falkiner
When French naval officer Louis de Freycinet came back from the Napoleonic Wars, ready to find a wife, he chose Rose Pinon, a modest schoolteacher’s daughter, gently raised, but without fortune or connections. In the same year that Jane Austen died, Rose dressed herself in men’s clothing and set off to accompany her husband on a scientific expedition to the southern hemisphere. Although not the first woman to circumnavigate the world by sail, Rose was the first to leave an account of her journey.