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Jane Dunn née Thesen born in Durban [|Durban, South Africa]

Married Philip Dunn, publisher, divorced. Children Ben Dunn, Lily Dunn. Married Nicholas D. M. Ostler. Jane's Great-Great Grandfather[|Great-Great-Grandfather Charles Wilhelm Thesen]

and Jane's other Great-Great-Grandfather, John Bennie, the Xhosa linguist, missionary and co-founder of Lovedale Mission School which became the academy for many of the ANC intellectuals like Chris Hani, Steve Biko and Govan Mbeki.

[|John Bennie]

Jane came over with her family from South Africa in 1956. She was the eldest child of her parents, and they settled in Wiltshire [|Wiltshire], where her father worked as a civil engineer. Her mother had been a nurse. Jane studied Philosophy at University College London. Having won a competition for her writing, her first employment was at Vogue Magazine, during which time her portrait was painted by John Ward. Jane wrote her first biography on Mary Shelley, calling it "Moon in Eclipse".

Later she wrote on the sister bond between painter Vanessa Bell and novelist Virginia Woolf in "The Very Close Conspiracy"; the fraught political relation between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, the romance between Sir William Temple and Dorothy Osborne in the Civil War, and the novelist Antonia White[|Antonia White], whose "Frost in May" was the first work published by Virago.. Her most recent biography is of the novelist Daphne du Maurier and her sisters. In 2023, inspired by the work of [|Georgette Heyer], Jane has published two novels set in the Regency period, The Marriage Season and An Unsuitable Heiress. Jane Dunn was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.] https://rsliterature.org/fellow/jane-dunn-3/