Mary Elizabeth Maugham

Mary Elizabeth (née Maugham, later Paravicini) Hope, Baroness Glendevon (1915–1998) was the only child of English playwright, novelist, and short story writer W. Somerset Maugham and his then mistress, Syrie Wellcome.

She was known as Liza, after her father's first successful novel, Liza of Lambeth. Lady Glendevon was the plaintiff in one of the most celebrated family law trials of the early 1960s, when she fought her celebrated father's unsuccessful attempt to prove that she was not his child. Her parents married in 1917, after her mother's divorce from the British pharmaceuticals magnate Henry Wellcome. Her mother was a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo.

In his memoir Looking Back (1962), Somerset Maugham denied paternity of Liza. Around the same time, he attempted to have her disinherited in order to adopt his male secretary, suggesting that she was actually the child of Syrie by either Henry Wellcome, Gordon Selfridge or an unknown lover. The subsequent 21-month court case, fought in British and French courts, determined that Maugham was her biological father, and the author was legally barred from his adoption plans. Maugham's daughter was awarded approximately $1,400,000 in damages, comprising $280,000 in a cash settlement to compensate her for paintings originally willed to her, along with royalties to some of his books, and the controlling interest in his French villa.

On 20 July 1936 at St. Margaret's, Westminster, Liza Maugham married Lt.-Col. Vincent Rudolph Paravicini, a son of the Swiss Minister (i.e. ambassador) to the Court of St. James's, Charles Paravicini.

Their first child, born in 1937, was Nicholas Vincent Somerset Paravicini, who would marry Mary Ann Parker Bowles, sister of Andrew Parker Bowles. They had two sons and a daughter:

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