Who is Elizabeth Lackersteen from Burmese Days and what is their importance?

Elizabeth, born around 1903, is the young and attractive niece of Dan Lackersteen. She is tallish and slender, with her yellow hair worn short in an Eton crop. Her hands are long, slender, and youthful. She wears spectacles and has clear, pale blue eyes. Her father had been sometimes successful, and from fourteen to sixteen years of age she spent a few years at an exclusive public school—the period formed her entire worldview. Everything in Elizabeth's experience is either "lovely", or expensive and aristocratic, or "beastly", which is cheap, low, shabby, or bad. After her father's financial failure in 1919 and subsequent death, her mother determined to become an artist and moved to Paris where rents were less expensive.