Frances Margaretta Jacson (born 13 October 1754 at Bebington, Cheshire, died 17 June 1842 at Somersal Herbert, Derbyshire) was an English novelist.
[citation needed] While the family were at Tarporley, they became worried about Frances's other brother Shallcross (died 1821), also an ordained priest, who had taken to drink and horse-racing.
On their father's death in 1808, they had to find a new home and accepted an offer made by their cousin Lord St Helens to lend them Somersal Hall for life.
[citation needed] She was desolated by the death of her sister in 1829, but eventually resumed her social life among the county gentry and her extended family.
Her favourite nephew Henry Gally Knight (a Tory) kept her in touch with politics, in which she was a firm Whig and supporter of parliamentary reform.
[4] Despite the financial motives behind her writing activity, Jacson never abandoned her moral purpose, so that her novels are didactic, all featuring a heroine in relatively high society.
Rhoda was preferred to Jane Austen's Emma by Maria Edgeworth, from whom the Jacson sisters received a social call in 1818.