Born Lore Seligmann on 13 May 1909[1] to a German Jewish family, she joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) while a student in Frankfurt in 1927.
After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, she left Germany for Britain, where she and her husband Paul Anderson (1908–1972) became members of the small group of socialist exiles from Nazi Germany in Britain that included Julius Braunthal and Franz Borkenau.
Her long article "The Underground Struggle in Germany", published under the pseudonym Evelyn Lend, occupied nearly the whole of an issue of Fact, edited by Raymond Postgate, in 1938.
She joined the left-wing weekly newspaper Tribune in 1943 as assistant editor, covering foreign affairs.
She became a close friend of Orwell when he joined the paper later the same year, and her strong antipathy to communism played a major role in determining the paper's political stance in the late 1940s, although she was considered obsessive about eastern Europe by some members of staff.