Early Life
Barber attended Lady Eleanor Holles School. While undertaking her A-levels, Barber had a two year relationship with a significantly older man, whom she knew as Simon Goldman, but who also called himself Simon Prewalski, an associate of Peter Rachman, who deceived both Barber and her parents: this affair was subsequently to provide the basis for a memoir by Barber and a movie (see Career below).
She read English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. While at Oxford she was "briefly" the girlfriend of drug smuggler Howard Marks, but met David Maurice Cloudesley Cardiff, whom she married in 1971; they had two daughters. Cardiff died in August 2003.
In 2010, listeners to BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs heard Barber admit to sleeping with 'probably 50 men' during two terms at Oxford. 'It was quite good going - I was just jamming them in,' she said.
Read more about this topic: Lynn Barber
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)