My unbelievable great, great Aunt Maria.

For 17 years from 1850, this iron-willed lady single-handedly tried to reclaim a family estate from a wealthy mill-owning, ruthless family, and ended up being incarcerated in a lunatic asylum for having 'delusions of exaltation'. What?
We will never know how much that family paid to have her kept there, but her story inspired me to write my first novel which tells how retribution was finally visited following her hair-raising escape.