Marghanita Laski

Marghanita Laski (24 October 1915 – 6 February 1988) was an English journalist, radio panellist and novelist. She also wrote literary biography, plays and short stories, and contributed about 250,000 additions to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Personal life Marghanita Laski was born in Manchester, England, to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals (Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather, and Harold Laski her uncle). She was educated at Lady Barn House School in Manchester and St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, worked in fashion, then studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was a close friend of Inez Pearn, who was later to become a novelist and marry Stephen Spender and subsequently, after a divorce, Charles Madge.

While she was at Oxford she met John Eldred Howard, founder of the Cresset Press; they married in 1937. During this time she worked as a journalist.

Career Laski began writing in earnest after her son and daughter were born. Most of her output in the 1940s and 1950s was fiction. She wrote the original screenplay of the 1952 UK film It Started in Paradise and sold the film rights to Little Boy Lost (1949), her novel about an Englishman in search of a lost son in the ruins of post-war France, to John Mills. However, when the film adaptation was released in 1953 she was upset that it had been turned into a musical starring Bing Crosby.

On 1 October 1970 The Times published "The Appeal of Georgette Heyer", Laski's controversial article about the bestselling historical novelist Georgette Heyer, which raised a storm of protest from Heyer's fans.

Laski was a member of the Annan Committee on broadcasting between 1974 and 1977. She joined the Arts Council in 1979, was elected its Vice Chair in 1982, and served as the Chair of the Literature Panel from 1980 to 1984. making her (according to Ilan Stavans) "the supreme contributor, male or female, to the OED". Laski’s connection to the OED began in 1958, when Robert (Bob) Burchfield, Editor of the Supplement of the OED in the 1960s, published his second periodical desiderata list requesting the public’s aid in search for antedatings to specific vocabularies. It was to this list that Laski responded and began her time volunteering for the OED. In just her first year alone, Laski contributed 8,600 slips. Thus, Laski was, of course, mentioned in Burchfield’s first five-year report to the Oxford University Press (OUP) as one of the five outstanding figures who made significant input to the quotation files, in first place with 31,000 contributions. She was known to be fond of crime fiction, and her OED influence in particular to her interest in the works of Charlotte Yonge translated onto the novelist’s accession within the OED’s first and second editions. Laski was also one of the few individuals to receive a copy of that first volume of the Supplement even before its publication. in which he offered to make the quotation files of Merriam-Webster’s works available to the compilers of the OED Supplement. Together they filled documentary gaps in the quotations of earlier texts.

Broadcasting Laski was a panellist on the popular UK BBC panel shows What's My Line? (1951–63), The Brains Trust (late 1950s), and Any Questions? (1960s). Laski was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences has been compared to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James in its importance.

Death Laski died at Royal Brompton Hospital, London, due to a smoking-related lung problem, on 6 February 1988, aged 72. The Patchwork Book (1946), editor To Bed with Grand Music (1946), as Sarah Russell Victorian Tales for Girls (1947), editor Tory Heaven or Thunder on the Right (1948), political satire Little Boy Lost (1949), novel Toasted English (US edition of Tory Heaven) (1949) Mrs Ewing, Mrs Molesworth and Mrs Hodgson Burnett (1950), biography The Village (1952) novel, reprinted 2004 It Started in Paradise (1952), film screenplay The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953) novel, reprinted 1999 The Tower (1955), short story Apologies (1955), caricature The Offshore Island (1959) play Ecstasy: a Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (1961), psychology A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge (1965) editor with Georgina Battiscombe Jane Austen and Her World (1969), literary history God and Man (1971), with Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh religion George Eliot and Her World (1973) literary history Kipling's English History (1974) Rudyard Kipling poems, editor Everyday Ecstasy (1980), psychology Ferry, the Jerusalem Cat (1983), story From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and at Home (1987), biography Common Ground: an Anthology (1989), editor To Bed with Grand Music (2001) (posthumous)