Elizabeth Longford: 'Aesthetes' Moll' and Royal Biographer

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LADY Longford, who died late last year at the age of ninety-six, was a modest hero of social change and a celebrated biographer. From a comfortable background, with strong connections to the higher echelons of power, she belonged to a section of the upper classes that viewed its position in society as containing responsibilities as well as rights. Despite great determination, she failed to win election to the House of Commons, but in many ways she was a spiritual forebear to more successful female Labour politicians, from Barbara Castle in the Labour Cabinets of the sixties and seventies, through to the more recent 'Blair Babes'. Indeed, two members of her own family have been in recent Cabinets: Harriet Harman in a Labour Cabinet and Virginia Bottomley in a Conservative Cabinet.

Lady Longford was born Elizabeth Harman. Three influences were strong in her life: family, religion, and politics. Her father, Nathaniel, was a prominent doctor; a Baptist, he had had to convert to Unitarianism in order to marry her mother Katherine. Tension between different Christian denominations would later recur in her marriage. Within the political realm, her great-uncle was the Tory colossus Joseph Chamberlain, who would feature in her first serious work, Jameson's Raid, dealing as it did with his involvement in anti-Boer intrigue prior to the Boer war.

After a nannied childhood, she attended Francis Holland School in London, and the Headington School in Oxford, and seemed destined to make her own mark upon the world. During her time reading Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she became the first female editor of the …