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Stella Charnaud was born in Constantinople in 1894, the daughter of the director of the tobacco monopoly of the Ottoman Empire. In 1914 she travelled to London to train as a secretary, and in 1925 she went to India as the secretary of Alice, Lady Reading, wife of the new Viceroy Rufus Daniel Isaacs, Lord Reading. Lord Reading was a lawyer, judge, diplomat, ambassador and politician. He was created marquess in 1926, becoming the first commoner to rise to this rank since Wellington.
Stella became Lord Reading's private secretary after they returned from India. He came to depend on her, and after Alice died of cancer in 1930, he and Stella were married in 1931. Lord Reading was 71 and Stella was 37. They had no children. Stella devoted herself to the marriage, but after his death in 1935, as the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, she stood out in her own right as capable and determined in support of various causes. In 1938 she was asked by the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, to form a service of women to prepare for the civil dislocation inevitable during wartime. The result was the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS).
After the War Stella, while maintaining her leadership of the WVS, also served for other causes including Governor of the BBC, 1946-51, and chair of the Advisory Council on Commonwealth Immigration. She was awarded 5 honorary doctorates from universities around the world. In 1958 she was created Baroness Swanborough, becoming the first woman life peer to take a seat in the House of Lords.
Information from Windlesham, 'Isaacs , Stella, marchioness of Reading and Baroness Swanborough (1894-1971)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 and A. Lentin, 'Isaacs, Rufus Daniel, first marquess of Reading (1860-1935)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011.