Marghanita Laski

Marghanita Laski (24 October 1915 – 6 February 1988) was an English journalist, radio panellist and novelist; she also wrote literary biography, plays and short stories.

Marghanita Laski was born in Manchester, England, to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals (Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather and Harold Laski her uncle), she was educated at Lady Barn House School and St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, worked in fashion, then studied English at Somerville College, Oxford

In 1937 she married publisher John Eldred Howard, a founder of the Cresset Press in Paris, and worked in journalism.

Laski lived in Hampstead and Abbots Langley.

After her son and daughter were born, Laski began writing in earnest. An omnivorous reader, from 1958 onward she became a prolific and compulsive contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary and by 1986 had "carded" around 250,000 quotations, making her (according to Ilan Stavans) "the supreme contributor, male or female, to the OED".

In the 1960s, Laski was the science fiction critic for The Observer. Elected Vice Chairwoman of the Arts Council in 1982, she served as chair of its Literature Panel between 1980 and 1984.

...
Wikipedia