Born in Victorian Sydney, she was presented at Court to Queen Victoria and then married a Prussian count. The marriage was unhappy, and her subsequent marriage to Bertrand Russell’s brother was also a disaster. More cheerful were her affairs with H.G. Wells and Alexander Stuart Frere. She was an habituée of the period’s literary circles, employing E. M. Forster as tutor to her children, and became hugely successful as the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim.