Mary Elizabeth Hope, Baroness Glendevon (1 September 1915 – 27 December 1998)[1] (née Wellcome, later Maugham,[2] later Paravicini) was the daughter of Somerset Maugham and Syrie Barnardo Wellcome, and the wife of the 1st Baron Glendevon. Liza, as she was known, came to public attention when she and her father fought a 21-month court case in British and French courts to determine her paternity.
Hope's daughter by her first husband is the Countess Frédéric Chandon de Brailles by marriage. Hope's second son was the 2nd Baron Glendevon and her third son is the current Baron Glendevon. Hope's grandson by her first son is the pianist, Derek Paravicini.
Born in 1915, Hope was the daughter of English writer W. Somerset Maugham and Syrie Wellcome (née Barnardo).
When Hope was born, her mother, the daughter of Barnardo's founder Thomas John Barnardo,[3] had been married to the British pharmaceuticals magnate Henry Wellcome. They later divorced and Barnardo married Maugham in 1917.
Hope was the couple's only child. She was known as Liza, after her father's first successful novel, Liza of Lambeth.
In his 1962 memoir Looking Back, Somerset Maugham, who was bisexual, denied paternity of Liza. Around the same time, he attempted to have her disinherited so that he could adopt his male secretary.
Maugham suggested that Liza was the daughter of Syrie Barnardo and Wellcome or Gordon Selfridge or a third, unnamed, lover. The subsequent 21-month court case, fought in British and French courts, determined that Maugham was Liza's biological father, and the author was legally barred from his adoption plans.
Liza was awarded approximately $1,400,000 in damages, consisting of $280,000 in a cash settlement to compensate her for paintings originally willed to her along with royalties for some of Maugham's books and controlling interest in his French villa.[4]
On 20 July 1936[5] at St. Margaret's, Westminster, Liza married Lt. Col. Vincent Rudolph Paravicini. The groom was the son of Charles Paravicini, the Swiss Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The couple had two children, Nicholas (b. 1937) and Camilla (b. 1941).
In 1948, following her divorce from Paravicini, Liza married John Hope, 1st Baron Glendevon, with whom she had 2 more children:
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