Marghanita Laski
Marghanita Laski was a multifaceted British author, born on October 24, 1915, in London, England. Growing up in a family steeped in intellectualism and religious heritage, her grandfather was a significant rabbinical figure and her uncle a noted political theorist. Laski pursued an education at Somerville College, Oxford, earning a degree in English in 1936, before embarking on a varied career that included fashion design, publishing, farming, nursing, and intelligence work during World War II. She gained prominence through her contributions to the BBC and became a familiar voice on radio quiz programs.
Laski's literary career began with her 1944 science fiction novel, *Love on the Supertax*, followed by works that explored themes of class consciousness and the aftermath of war, such as *Tory Heaven* and *Little Boy Lost*. She also authored several nonfiction titles that examined Victorian children's literature and religious experiences. Laski passed away on February 6, 1988, in Dublin, Ireland, leaving behind a legacy that includes posthumously published works. Her diverse output reflects her deep engagement with societal issues and the human experience.
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Marghanita Laski
Writer
- Born: October 24, 1915
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: February 6, 1988
- Place of death: Dublin, Ireland
Biography
Marghanita Laski was born on October 24, 1915, in London, England, the daughter of Neville J. Laski, an attorney, and Phina Gaster Laski. She grew up in an environment charged with religion, intellectualism, and politics. Her grandfather, Moses Gaster, was chief rabbi of the Sephardic Jewish community in England, and her uncle was the eminent Fabian, Harold Laski, a well-known political theorist, economist, socialist, author, and lecturer, who chaired the British Labour Party from 1945 until 1946.
After leaving secondary school, Laski worked in fashion design and conducted philological research; always a stickler for proper usage, over the years she submitted some 250,000 illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary. She attended Sommerville College, Oxford University, graduating with a B.A. degree in English in 1936. The following year she married publisher John Eldred Howard, with whom she had two children, Rebecca and Jonathan.
Laski occupied the early days of her married life in a variety of ways. She worked in publishing, was a dairy farmer, served a stint as a nurse, performed intelligence work during World War II, wrote articles and reviews for a number of periodicals, and entered broadcasting. She often was heard on such British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio programs as The Critics and The Brains Trust, the latter a popular British quiz program. In 1951, she was one of the panelists on the long-running American quiz show, What’s My Line?.
Laski began to write books after the birth of her second child. Her first book was a work of science fiction, Love on the Supertax (1944), which described a very different English society following a devastating war. After editing two children’s anthologies, The Patchwork Book and Stories of Adventure, Laski published the well-received Tory Heaven: Or, Thunder on the Right, a satire on the hierarchy of the British class system. Another novel, The Village, also humorously explored class consciousness, while Little Boy Lost poignantly dealt with displaced persons in the wake of World War II. The Victorian Chaise-Longue is a horror novel in which a young woman time-travels back to the nineteenth century to find herself transformed into the furniture’s original owner.
Laski also wrote a numer of nonfiction books. These include Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, a critical study of Victorian children’s authors, and the biographies Jane Austen and Her World, George Eliot and Her World, and From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and at Home. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences, God and Man, and Everyday Ecstasy deal with religious and philosophical issues.
Laski died after a brief illness on February 6, 1988, in Dublin, Ireland. Several of her works were published posthumously.