...(or so I just read) which I don't have in front of me at the moment, but I also found the following excerpt from a piece at the JASA website, I can't tell who wrote it but I think it may be Fullerton:

Rumours circulated that Mrs Leigh Perrot was a kleptomaniac and there is a small piece of evidence that supports this theory. An anonymous manuscript, now at an American university, talks of Mrs Leigh Perrot being ‘charged with stealing plants’ some years after her trial. In 1844 a friend of James Edward Austen (who inherited Jane Leigh Perrot’s fortune when she died in 1836) recorded that ‘the lady had an invincible propensity to stealing’. The evidence is too scanty to convict Jane Leigh Perrot of kleptomania. Perhaps more suspicious is the strong, almost morbid desire her husband showed from the time of the lace theft, never to be away from her. Letters he wrote her in 1806, when they were apart for a short time, reveal a chronic
anxiety about her being left on her own. Was this due to a worry that she may repeat her offence if he was not there to guard her? Probably we will never know, but a doubt as to her honesty has lingered through history, making it easier for biographers to share Jane Austen’s dislike of the woman who may have inspired the creation of Mrs Norris"