Mary_Elizabeth_Maugham

Elizabeth Hope, Baroness Glendevon

Elizabeth Hope, Baroness Glendevon

English daughter of Somerset Maugham and Syrie Welcome (1915–1998)


Mary Elizabeth Hope, Baroness Glendevon (1 September 1915 – 27 December 1998)[1] (née Wellcome, later Maugham,[2] formerly Paravicini), was the only child of the English writer W. Somerset Maugham by his then-mistress Syrie Wellcome, a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo.[3]

Quick Facts The Right HonourableThe Lady Glendevon, Born ...

She was known as Liza, after her father's first successful novel, Liza of Lambeth. She was the plaintiff in one of the most celebrated family law trials of the early 1960s, when she challenged Somerset Maugham's attempt to prove that she was not his child. At her birth in 1915 her mother was still married to the British pharmaceuticals magnate Henry Wellcome, whom she divorced before marrying Somerset Maugham in 1917.

In his 1962 memoir Looking Back, Somerset Maugham, a bisexual, denied paternity of Liza. Around the same time, he attempted to have her disinherited in order to adopt his male secretary, suggesting that she was actually the child of Syrie by either Henry Wellcome, Gordon Selfridge or an unknown lover. The subsequent 21-month court case, fought in British and French courts, determined that Maugham was her biological father, and the author was legally barred from his adoption plans. Maugham's daughter was awarded approximately $1,400,000 in damages, comprising $280,000 in a cash settlement to compensate her for paintings originally willed to her, along with royalties for some of his books, and the controlling interest in his French villa.[4]

Marriages and children

She married twice:

First marriage

On 20 July 1936[5] at St. Margaret's, Westminster, she married Lt. Col. Vincent Rudolph Paravicini, a son of Charles Paravicini, the Swiss Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, by whom she had two children:

Second marriage

In 1948, following her divorce, she married John Hope, 1st Baron Glendevon, with whom she had 2 more children:

See also


References

  1. "Obituary: Lady Glendevon". Independent.co.uk. 22 October 2011.
  2. Her birth name is given as Mary Elizabeth Maugham at ellisisland.org, where she is listed, along with her mother, then Syrie Wellcome, on manifest of HMS Baltic dated 21 July 1916.
  3. Susan Rose Phipps profile, ukpub.net; retrieved 13 September 2008.
  4. Cassandra Jardine. 'It's all Parker Bowles this and that' Daily Telegraph, 4 July 2007.
  5. Michael Rhodes. "Manuel Basil (Bluey) Mavroleon 1927-2009" 17 March 2009

Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Mary_Elizabeth_Maugham, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.