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 Lamb was one of 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, her father was killed in action in the Great War at the 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Pansy Pakenham and her siblings had few friends outside their immediate family, which Lady Mary attributed to the out-of-date clothes that they wore as children.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".

In London Pansy Pakenham's mother was a friend of the widow of Herbert Gardner, 1st Baron Burghclere, who had died in 1921. Unusually, the two women allowed their daughters, Pansy and Evelyn Gardner, to take a flat together in Ebury Street. For a time Pansy worked in an architect's office. The two friends were mixed up in the affairs of the Bright young things, Among their closest friends was Nancy Mitford. 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 in 1928 to the artist Henry Lamb, who was almost twenty years her senior. They played host to many friends, including John Betjeman, Bryan Guinness, David Cecil, and L. P. Hartley. 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.

In 1945, she wrote to her friend Evelyn Waugh, commenting on his new book Brideshead Revisited: You cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world that you describe, or at any rate impinged on it. I was a debutante in 1922 and though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses ... it all seems very dull. She published little more until after the death of her husband in 1960, when, settling again in London, she edited a collection of the letters of Dickens. and a son, the journalist Valentine Lamb.