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
Hercules Pakenham Hercules Pakenham Colonel Hercules Arthur Pakenham CMG, DL, JP (17 February 1863 – 28 March 1937) was a unionist politician in Northern Ireland. A member of the Pakenham family headed by the Earl of Longford, he was the eldest son of Lieutenant-General Thomas Pakenham, by Elizabeth Clarke, daughter of William Clarke, of New York City. He was educated at Eton and the Royal Military College Sandhurst from which he was commissioned as an officer in the Grenadier Guards in 1883. He held posts as aide de camp to the Governor General of Canada from 1886 to 1888, and to the