Her mother, Rachel, learned English after the family settled in Glasgow, and later became an actress at the Old Vic.
[4] At age 16, Litvin won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and studied with Clifford Curzon[3] and Arthur Benjamin.
After the Second World War, she gave a concert at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to inmates who were recovering in its hospital wing.
She was the soloist in the world's first televised concert for the BBC, the last night of The Proms on 13 September 1947 from the Royal Albert Hall.
[5] She first met Stephen Spender in 1940, marrying him in 1941, and the couple were for many years part of a literary circle which included W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, T. S. Eliot and Sir Isaiah Berlin.