Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. "Able, articulate and beautiful", in the words of "The New York Times", she was "the Zuleika Dobson of her day, with undergraduates and even dons tumbling over one another to fall in love with her". A few years after her graduation, on 3 November 1931, she married Frank Pakenham, later 7th Earl of Longford, who died in August 2001. Her obituary by the BBC said the marriage was "famously harmonious." "The New York Times", in its review of "The Pebbled Shore", called Lady Longford "easily the best writer in what is predominantly a literary
The Woman Who Lived very good, bringing nuance and humanity to what in lesser hands might just feel like just another random historical character with hints of deeper mystery. But her work in 'The Woman Who Lived' is an order of magnitude better, if only because she is asked to do so much more here than she was last week." Though Wilkins found fault with the episode's "quickie" climax resolution, he ultimately believed that: "[W]hatever small deficiencies there might be in the ancillary elements are more than offset by how strong the core of this episode is." He closed his review by stating "The