Patricia Russell, Countess Russell Patricia Russell, Countess Russell Patricia Russell, Countess Russell (1910–2004) was the third wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell, and a significant contributor to his book "A History of Western Philosophy". Countess Russell was born Marjorie Helen Spence in 1910. As her parents had always wanted a boy, she was known as 'Peter'. She met Bertrand Russell in 1930 when she was a twenty-year-old undergraduate at the University of Oxford, hired by Russell's second wife Dora Black as a governess. They had an affair and were married at the Midhurst register office on 18 January 1936. They had one son, Conrad Sebastian
Bertrand Russell Park. His grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth. The countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule), and her influence on Bertrand