Mary Elizabeth Maugham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mary Elizabeth Maugham Paravicini Hope, Baroness Glendevon (born Mary Elizabeth Wellcome) (1915 - 1998)[1] was the only child of English playwright, novelist, and short story writer William Somerset Maugham and his then mistress, Syrie Wellcome. Lady Glendevon also was the plaintiff in one of the most celebrated family-law trials of the early 1960s, when she fought her celebrated father's unsuccessful attempt to prove that she was not his child.
Her parents married in 1917, after her mother's divorce from the British pharmeceuticals magnate Henry Wellcome. Her mother was a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo.
On 20 July 1937, at St. Margaret's, Westminster, Liza Maugham married Lt.-Col. Vincent Rudolph Paravicini, a son of the Swiss Minister to the Court of St. James's, Charles Paravicini. They divorced in 1948. That same year, she married Lord John Hope, who later became the first Baron Glendevon. She had children by both marriages: Nicholas Somerset Paravicini, Camilla Paravicini (Mrs. Bluey Mavroleon, later Countess Frédéric Chandon de Brailles), Julian John Somerset Hope (2nd Lord Glendevon), and Hon. Jonathan Charles Hope.
In his memoir Looking Back (1962) Somerset Maugham denied paternity of Liza. Around the same time, he attempted to have her disinherited in order to adopt his male secretary, suggesting that she was actually the child of Syrie Maugham and Henry Wellcome. The subsequent 21-month court case, fought in British and French courts, determined that Maugham was her biological father, and the author was legally barred from his adoption plans. Maugham's daughter was awarded approximately $1,400,000 in damages, comprising $280,000 in a cash settlement to compensate her for paintings originally willed to her, along with royalties to some of his books, and the controlling interest in his French villa.[2]
