Lady Pansy Lamb

Lady Margaret Pansy Felicia Lamb, known as Lady Pansy Lamb (18 May 1904 – 19 February 1999) was an English writer under her maiden name of Pansy Pakenham. A novelist, biographer, and translator of French poetry, she was the wife of the Australian-born painter Henry Lamb.

Early life

One of the four daughters of Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford, by his marriage to Lady Mary Child Villiers, a daughter of Victor Child Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey, the young Pansy did not go to school and claimed to be entirely self-educated. In 1915, when she was eleven, during the Great War, her father was killed in action at Scimitar Hill, part of the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign. Thereafter, Pansy was brought up by her mother with her brothers Edward and Frank and her sisters Violet, Mary, and Julia. In 1922 she was a debutante.

Pansy Pakenham and her siblings had few friends outside of their immediate family, which Lady Mary attributed to the out-of-date clothes that they wore as children. Mary's obituary in The Guardian in April 2010 said that the Longford children had had "a fierce independence of spirit and a positive relish for being different". Their childhood Christmases were spent at their mother's ancestral home, Middleton Park at Middleton Stoney in Oxfordshire, and these were recalled in Mary's novel Christmas with the Savages (1955).