Miss Fitzsimmons was one of that curious breed of elderly English female eccentric—I suspect more common then than now

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 102.  

Miss Fitzsimmons was one of that curious breed of elderly English female eccentric—I suspect more common then than now—who settled in some far-flung corner of the world and lived there, alone and for the most part completely happy, for half a century. When my mother had been in Bou-Saada the previous summer she had been walking round the town, which was composed largely of mud huts, and had suddenly come upon one whose front door bore a wooden plaque on which was carved, in large Gothic letters, the single word FITZSIMMONS. Intrigued, she had knocked at the door. Miss Fitzsimmons had answered it herself, welcomed my mother as a long-lost friend and told her the story of her life; and now, at my mother’s urging, she told it again for my benefit. She had come to Bou-Saada for a holiday when still in her twenties, and had fallen in love with Ben, whom she described as a near genius but who had not advanced beyond the post of camel keeper at the Transatlantic. She and Ben had shacked up together; he had taken her to meet his tribe in the deep Sahara, where she had fallen seriously ill but had been cured by some appalling local technique—which she described in the most lurid detail but which I have now, perhaps fortunately, forgotten. After many happy years Ben had died—he had been considerably older—and she had remained in Bou-Saada ever since. We asked her what she did with herself nowadays; “Oh,” she said, “I make myself useful.”