Lady Magdalene De Lancey

Born in 1793, Magdalene Hall married Sir William Howe De Lancey in 1815, just before he joined the Duke of Wellington's army as quartermaster-general. She is most closely associated with the Waterloo campaign, where her husband was gravely wounded in the battle and died soon afterward.

Her reputation rests on the journal she wrote about those events, later published as A Week at Waterloo in 1815. Rather than offering a distant military history, the book records what she saw and felt at close range, which gives it much of its lasting power.

Though she died young in 1822, her writing remains an important firsthand glimpse of the aftermath of Waterloo and of the emotional lives caught up in it. Readers still turn to her work for its immediacy, clarity, and unusual perspective on a famous moment in European history.