Elizabeth Lake was the pen-name adopted by Inez Pearn, a girl from a working-class background who won a scholarship to Oxford in the 1930s to study Spanish literature. She was active in the campaign for Britain to support the Spanish Republic and was later involved in the Mass Observation movement. She wrote five novels. Along the way she mixed with a host of contemporary artists and intellectuals, including Marghanita Laski, Sally Graves, Phillip Toynbee, A J Ayer, the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy and the painter Sir William Coldstream, whose portrait of her is held in the Tate Britain. She was briefly married to Stephen Spender and subsequently, more enduringly, to the poet and sociologist Charles Madge.
