Although some of her poetic and dramatic works were printed in student publications in the 1920s, the public writing career of Elizabeth Longford did not commence until the 1950s. Involved in the political process throughout her life and best known for her biographies of political figures, most notably the duke of Wellington and Queen Victoria, Longford's biographical subjects also include the poets George Gordon, Lord Byron and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and offer a unique perspective into the lives of her subjects.

She was born Elizabeth Harman on 30 August 1906 in her family's home at 108 Harley Street in London. Both of Longford's parents, Nathaniel Bishop Harman and Katherine Chamberlain Harman, had qualified as doctors, although only her father practiced. In her memoirs The Pebbled Shore (1986), Longford describes her mother as a woman endowed with "intelligence, exceptional memory and unsleeping sympathies" whose marriage to her father "suppressed the assertive side of...