Her brother Thomas Jefferson Leslie graduated from West Point and her other sister, Martha “Patty,” married the book publisher Henry Charles Carey.

[3] Eliza Leslie attended the cooking school of the famed Mrs. Goodfellow for two terms, and her first book was based on notes she had taken of Goodfellow's class recipes, although in the introduction she insisted the recipes were "original, and have been used by the author and many of her friends with uniform success."

[1] Leslie's Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches (1837), sold at least 150,000 copies and stayed in print into the 1890s, making it the most popular cookbook of the century.

Almost yearly, between 1836 and 1845, Leslie edited an annual gift book called The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present, with contributions from Edgar Allan Poe (which included the first appearances of five short stories including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Manuscript in a Bottle," and "The Purloined Letter"), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[2] Her 1842 story "The Beaux, A Sketch" has been suggested by Sarah Glosson as the earliest-known published derivative work based on Jane Austen.