Her brother, another Sir William Goodenough Hayter, went on to become British ambassador to the Soviet Union and Warden of New College, Oxford, while her sister Priscilla Napier was a biographer.
[2] Hayter was educated at Downe House School, in Berkshire, then under the headship of its founder Olive Willis, and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she arrived in 1929 and went on to graduate BA in modern history.
[1] Of her time at Oxford, Hayter later wrote "We were conventional and innocent, though we considered ourselves pioneering and revolutionary – not in politics, we were not much interested in them, but in our preferences in literature, the arts, social values...
In 1960, she went to Paris as Deputy Representative and assistant cultural attaché, and her apartment on the Île Saint-Louis became a meeting place for writers and artists.
On the basis of their originality, Hayter' most important works are considered to be A Sultry Month (1965),[3] Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), Horatio’s Version (1972) and A Voyage in Vain (1973).