Background
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.
Career
A novelist, biographer, and translator of French poetry, she was the wife of the Australian-born painter Henry Lamb. In 1922 she was a debutante. 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).
Foreign a time Pansy worked in an architect"s office. In 1928, with Pansy"s encouragement, Evelyn Gardner married the older Waugh"s novelist brother Evelyn Waugh, but this was not a success.
This event was soon followed by Pansy"s own marriage to the artist Henry Lamb, almost twenty years older than she was. The Lambs set up home in the small village of Coombe Bissett, where they had three children, first two daughters, Henrietta and Felicia, and finally a son, Valentine.
Betjeman recorded the era in a poem
O the calm of Coombe Bissett is tranquil and deep,
Where Ebble flows soft in her downland asleep;
There beauty to me came a-pushing a pram
In the shape of the sweet Pansy Felicia Lamb.
You cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920"son And yet it was the same world that you describe, or at any rate impinged on lieutenant I was a debutante in 1922 and though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses.. it all seems very dull.
You see English Society of the 20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs.
I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I believe it still is. In 1928, Pansy Pakenham published a novel, The Old Expedient, and in 1928 another, August, still using her maiden name.
In 1936 she produced a biography of King Charles I, for Duckworth. In 1956 came The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems, an English translation of a work by Charles Péguy.
She became a guide at Street Peter"s and was devoted to Pope John Paul World War II She died in London in February 1999, at the age of ninety-four.
