She attended school at Granville House, Eastbourne, and went on to serve for thirty years in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF),[3] where she worked in intelligence during World War II.

[6][7] She was appointed OBE (Military Division) in the 1948 New Year Honours,[8] she was granted a permanent commission as a wing officer in the secretarial branch of the renamed Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF) on 1 February 1949.

[18] Using a loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), in 1970 Princess Nina bought the estate and established Baskervilles Investments Ltd. in the Isle of Man.

[16] Eventually, the princess fell dramatically behind on the loan, and the RBS ended up with the rights to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works.

[16][17] The bank then sold the rights to Lady Etelka Duncan whose former son-in-law, Sheldon Reynolds, produced two series of Sherlock Holmes adaptations in the 1950s and 1990s.

When Warner Brothers made Sherlock Holmes, released in 2009, the studio was granted a license in 2006 by the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate and ended up signing a "Covenant not to Sue" a year later with Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.[17] At her death at age 84, Dame Jean's will stipulated that any remaining copyrights she owned were to be transferred to the Royal National Institute for the Blind.

)[21][22] On her death her cremated ashes were interred with those of her husband and his first wife in the churchyard of All Saints Church at Minstead in the New Forest, near to where her parents had been reinterred in 1955, their remains having been transferred from the grounds of their home in Crowborough.