Education and career
In her forties, Elisabeth worked in public relations for her husband's company and campaigned for him in the general election of 1964; Robert was elected as the Labour MP for Buckingham. Elisabeth then enrolled at Oxford in 1970 and earned a BA degree in modern languages at St Hugh's College in 1974.
In 1981, at the age of 60, Elisabeth was awarded a PhD in French Literature from the University of Oxford for her thesis on The Art of Letter Writing in France, 1789–1830. Her thesis work focused on research about a Protestant circle in Lyons.
Elisabeth researched her husband's Jewish relatives who perished under Nazi rule, and discovered they amounted in total to over 300 of his immediate and extended family.
In 1988, Elisabeth organized a conference in both Oxford and London, titled "Remembering for the Future". That same year, she received the Sir Sigmund Sternberg award for furthering Christian-Jewish relations. Elisabeth authored a book on antisemitism titled Silence or Speaking Out, published in 1990 by Southampton University.
In November 1991, Elisabeth's husband, Robert, was found dead, floating in the waters off the Canary Islands near his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. Following his mysterious death, evidence emerged that Robert Maxwell had plundered his employees' pension funds from the Mirror Group. Their sons, Ian and Kevin, were arrested on fraud charges in June 1992 but acquitted in January 1996.
It was found that Elisabeth knew nothing about the missing pension funds; Elisabeth was left financially severely depleted after her husband's death. Yehuda Bauer, a fellow Holocaust historian, stated that after Robert Maxwell's death "Elisabeth lost her pension, all her property, and only her children continued to support her. She was a wonderful person, kind and supportive, quite contrary to her husband, whom she loved despite everything."
Following the pension scandal, Elisabeth reportedly left the UK and spent time at her chateau in France. She returned to Britain after the Duke of Westminster "let her a four-bedroomed townhouse at a peppercorn rent".
Elisabeth Maxwell's autobiography, entitled A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell, was published in November 1994. In a 1995 interview with The New York Times, she reflected on her marriage stating "The worst years of my life were 1981 to 1991. I was at his beck and call with no kudos, nothing was right. What saved me was my work on the Holocaust." In her seventies and early eighties, Elisabeth travelled and lectured widely on Holocaust studies.
Elisabeth Maxwell was an editor for the book Remembering for the Future: the Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, a comprehensive work including the contributions of nearly 200 scholars, published in 2001. According to BBC News, Elisabeth served as the executive chairman of the Remembering for the Future organization and was the opening speaker for the London conference Evil and Indifference: Is there an End to Genocide? held at Westminster Hall in July 2000. She was on the executive committee of the International Council of Christians and Jews and founded the International Conference on the Holocaust.
Elisabeth was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from the Woolf Institute at Cambridge for her work to improve relations between Christians and Jews. She was further recognized with an Honorary Fellowship at Tel Aviv University, and received the Eternal Flame Award of the Anne Frank Institute of Philadelphia.
