Natasha Spender

Natasha Spender, Lady Spender (née Litvin; 18 April 1919 – 21 October 2010) was an English pianist and author. She was the second wife of the writer Sir Stephen Spender. Biography She was born in London. Her maternal family emigrated to Britain as Jewish refugees from Lithuania. Her mother, Rachel, learned English after the family settled in Glasgow, and later became an actress at the Old Vic. Her father, who was married to another woman, was the music critic, Edwin Evans.

Due to her mother's work and precarous financial situation as a child Litvin was fostered her first nine years by a family in Maidenhead. She would later come to be raised in the family of George and Margaret Booth (her foster father was a son of Charles Booth) at Funtington House in West Sussex.

The Booths seeing that she had a talent for music encouraged her in this pursuit. At age 16, Litvin won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and studied with Clifford Curzon

She first met Stephen Spender in 1940, marrying him in 1941, and the couple were for many years part of a literary circle which included W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, T. S. Eliot and Sir Isaiah Berlin. They divided their time between their homes in St John's Wood and Mas St Jerome in Provence.

In 2007, Spender appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, choosing Mozart's 1st movement of String Quintet in G Minor, Walter de la Mare's Desert Islands: An Anthology, and her grand piano as her selected favourite record, book and luxury item respectively.