After studying at the University of Aberdeen and Girton College, Cambridge, she moved to London and published poems and reviews.
[1][2][3] Some of these were published by Leonard Woolf, then literary editor of the Nation and Athenaeum, with whom Lyn formed a long friendship.
[5] Subscribers included Clive and Julian Bell, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Maynard Keynes, Vita Sackville-West, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Irvine ended the journal in February 1935.
[5] In 1934, Irvine married the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman; they had two sons, Edward (born 1935) and William, later a computer scientist (1939).
[4] They bought Cross Farm, in the village of Comberton five miles from the city, as a family house, and Lyn considered this home for the rest of her life.