Her biographies are known for their strong narrative lines and their wealth of research and detail, drawn from personal visits to historic sites. She was the daughter of two Harley Street physicians and had a privileged upbringing. She was born Elizabeth Harman and was to be known as Elizabeth Pakenham for the first three decades of her marriage to Frank Pakenham they became Lord and Lady Longford in 1961. She ran for office unsuccessfully twice and had to bow out of a third contest, in which she was the favorite, because of pressure over her intent to have more children. Lady Longford confessed to having ''an addiction to motherhood'' and continued to have children even after her Labor Party handlers said it was getting in the way of her parliamentary career. A daughter, Catherine, a magazine writer, died in a car crash at age 23 in 1969, and a prominent prize for women in journalism is named for her.

She was already an academic and social success at Oxford University when John Betjeman, one of the many literary figures she befriended, called her ''the aesthetes' moll.'' Quintin Hogg, who later as Lord Hailsham became a Conservative lord chancellor, said, ''There was not an undergraduate who would not consider it a privilege to hold an umbrella over her.''Īmong her seven surviving children are the writers Antonia Fraser, Rachel Billington and Thomas Pakenham and the poet Judith Kazantzis. She was 96.įrom her school years through the nearly seven decades of her marriage to Lord Longford, she was famous for her intelligence, beauty, vitality and vivacity. Elizabeth Longford, the best-selling biographer and political activist who was the widow of the social reformer Lord Longford and the matriarch of a family that bred other well-known writers, died on Wednesday at her home in Sussex.

Queen Victoria by Elizabeth Longford