Edmondson also founded a youth holiday orchestra to provide musical opportunities for local young people in the York area, an organisation that has operated since 1992.
Much of Elizabeth Edmondson's body of work has included characters and settings from Jane Austen's novels, written in a similar style of comedy and romance.
[4] She described Austen as possessing the same appeal as Mozart, "She was a genius, whose writing speaks to the soul while it enchants and delights... Because of her deep understanding of human nature, and her portrayal of the comédie humaine, she transcends the gap of two centuries between then and now".
[8] The novel was a success for publisher Simon & Schuster, and led the company to produce further Austen adaptations and sequels by other authors, such as Pamela Aidan's Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman series.
[5] In a review from Publishers Weekly, Edmondson was praised for having "written a witty page-turning love letter to Austen's work",[13] while The Washington Post characterised Edmondson's book as a "fun to read" romantic comedy and noted that she "clearly relish[es] imagining what Austen might have written had she not died at a youthful 41".
Her final books were the Very English Mysteries, of which she only completed two of a planned series before her death in 2016 (A Man of Some Repute and A Question of Inheritance, along with the novella A Youthful Indiscretion).
[citation needed] The Guardian published an essay by Edmondson in 2014, which was an edited version of a debate speech she gave at the Oxford Literary Festival.
[18] She was born in Chile to an English father and an Argentine mother, educated by Benedictine nuns in Calcutta, India, and influenced by the Fabians in London, England.
[2] In the late 1960s, Edmondson read English Language and Literature at, and graduated from, St Hilda's College, Oxford,[1][18] where she studied Austen under the author's biographer Lord David Cecil.