A London society hostess, during the 1960s and the 1970s, she gained notoriety in gossip columns for her extramarital affair with Anglo-French financier James Goldsmith, member of the wealthy banking Goldschmidt family, who later became her second husband.
The second of three children, Lady Annabel was born in London into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family with its roots in Ulster and County Durham.
[5] She was named after her mother's favourite song, "Miss Annabel Lee", and grew up as a country child at her family's former estates of Mount Stewart, Wynyard Park, and Londonderry House.
[9] As part of the London social circle, she is known for her sense of humour, down-to-earth personality, and love of children and dogs.
[8] Lady Annabel is the mother of Rupert, Robin and India Jane Birley and Jemima, Zac and Ben Goldsmith.
"[10] She was also considered a mother figure by her nieces, Ladies Cosima and Sophia Vane-Tempest-Stewart,[7] and Diana, Princess of Wales.
[15] "There really is nothing worse than losing a child – and there is something special about your first-born", she said, adding that, "Because I was so young when Rupert was born ... we were more like good friends than mother and son.
"[4] Her first daughter India Jane (born 14 January 1961), the granddaughter of society portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, is an artist.
"Our breakup was because of Mark's infidelities, not because I fell in love with Jimmy", she told Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth after Birley's death.
Though both she and Goldsmith, who was then married to his second wife Ginette Lery, believed that the affair would be a passing fling, it soon gained her notoriety in London's gossip columns as a modern mistress.
She resides in Ormeley Lodge, a 6-acre (2.4 ha) Georgian mansion on the edge of Richmond Park, with two Grand Basset Griffon Vendéens, Daisy and Lily,[24] and three Norfolk terriers, Barney, Boris and Bindy.
[2] She spends part of each year at her 250-acre (1.0 km2) organic farm in the hills above Benahavís[26] and has a 1930s holiday home by the seaside in Bognor Regis, West Sussex.
She organised charitable donations and travelled daily to look after refugees who crossed the Austrian border into the frontier town of Andau.
[40] Starting from 12 January 2001, the organisation launched a £500,000 advertising and leafleting campaign to expose the parliamentary votes of pro-Brussels candidates in 120 "target" seats before the May general elections.
[41] The Democracy Movement released two million pamphlets carrying gloom-ridden headlines about a European state and published full page local newspaper advertisements in the constituencies of 70 Labour MPs, 35 Liberal Democrats, six Conservatives and three Scottish National Party candidates.
[42] Describing the campaign as an effort "in memory of Jimmy", she said: I'm not anti-European – my husband was half European and my children are a quarter French.
I felt she was still on the rebound from Hasnat Khan... She might have been having a wonderful time with him, I'm sure, but I thought her remark that she needed marriage like a rash meant that she was not serious about it", Lady Annabel told the jury.
On the promotion tour, she gave numerous interviews and participated in a discussion with historian Andrew Roberts at the annual Cheltenham Festival of Literature in April 2004.
[49] David Chapman, reviewing the book for the Newsquest Media Group Newspapers, concluded, "This is a decidedly funny memoir that includes the scrapes and japes of nob culture.
"[50] Lorne Jackson of the Sunday Mercury was totally dismissive of what he called "a dull memoir", stating: "This could have all been explained in one page, possibly two if the type was particularly large.
"[51] The Sunday Times commented that, "Annabel comes across as a decent woman ... but her writing is flat, with a few too many clumsy constructions, and her story lacks drama, even when terrible things happen to her.
"[52] Biographer Selina Hastings called it "a well-ordered, decently written book,"[53] while the Evening Standard wrote, "Goldsmith herself comes across as fun and warm, a good sport, if sometimes strangely submissive and a little overfond of her own breasts.
Copper was originally bought by the Goldsmiths as a reward to their daughter Jemima for passing her Common Entrance Examination, but he remained in Lady Annabel's care for most of his life and had an adventurous time in Richmond.
[56] The mongrel, who died in 1998, was famed for travelling by bus, chasing joggers and visiting a Richmond pub, the Dysart Arms.