Mary Elizabeth Maugham

Who was Mary Elizabeth Maugham?

Mary Elizabeth Maugham Paravicini Hope, Baroness Glendevon was the only child of English playwright, novelist, and short story writer W. 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 pharmaceuticals magnate Henry Wellcome. Her mother was a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo. She was known as Liza, after her father's first successful novel, Liza of Lambeth.

In his memoir Looking Back 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.