Liana Burgess, who died on Monday, Dec. 3, aged 78, was a translator, literary agent and the second wife of the novelist and composer Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers.
She was feared and respected by publishers throughout the world for her ability to drive a hard bargain on behalf of her husband's writing, and her prize-winning Italian translations of Burgess's Malayan Trilogy and The End of the World News did much to secure his reputation as one of the major European writers of the 20th century.
By the time he died in 1993, her shrewd negotiations with publishers and film companies had netted a fortune of more than $3 million and 11 houses all over Europe. She donated many of these assets to universities to promote the study of Burgess's work.
Liliana Macellari (who shortened her first name to Liana) was born in Porto Civitanova in Italy on September 25 1929. Her mother was the Contessa Maria Lucrezia Pasi della Pergola, an amateur poet and painter.
Lucrezia was said to have brought the family into disrepute by marrying a photographer and actor named Gilberto Macellari, who died during the Second World War after fathering two daughters.
Liana's sister, Grazia, died young in a mountaineering accident, and her mother, who claimed to be descended from Attila the Hun, spent years mourning her dead daughter by painting countless portraits of her and writing bad poetry in her memory.
Liana taught herself English by reading the novels of Henry James and, after graduating from the University of Bologna, she travelled to America in 1953 to pursue literary research on a Fulbright Fellowship. Here she met and married her first husband, Benjamin Johnson, the English translator of Italo Svevo's short stories.
The marriage was not a success; they separated shortly afterwards and Johnson divorced her in 1967.
In the late 1950s Liana Macellari returned to Rome, where she founded an English-language theatre company. Writing as Liana Johnson, she began her Italian translation of Lawrence Durrell's epic Alexandria Quartet in 1960.
In Rome she had an affair with an unemployed drifter called Roy Halliday, with whom she moved to London. After Halliday was drowned in a sailing accident in the Atlantic, Liana Macellari said that she had gained nothing from her involvement with him except his typewriter.
She met Anthony Burgess, who was to become her second husband, in 1963. While working for the Bompiani Literary Almanac, she was asked to compile an annual report on new English fiction.
When she read A Clockwork Orange and Inside Mr Enderby (published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell), she believed that she had discovered two novelists of genius. She wrote enthusiastically to both authors and was surprised to discover that they were the same man.
They arranged to meet for lunch in Chiswick, and immediately began a clandestine affair. "I fell in love with the work," she said later. "Anthony was never a good-looking man."
Burgess was powerfully attracted by her dark-haired beauty, and by her passionate hatred of the Italian state and the Roman Catholic Church.
He was unhappily married to his first wife, Llewela, a notoriously aggressive Welsh alcoholic, but refused to leave her for fear of offending his cousin, George Patrick Dwyer, who was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds.
Liana Macellari gave birth to a son by Burgess, Paolo Andrea (later known as Andrew Burgess Wilson), in 1964. They continued to meet in secret, and Llewela was told nothing of Burgess's illegitimate child.
In 1967 Liana took up a teaching post at King's College, Cambridge, where she made Italian translations of Thomas Pynchon's V and The Crying of Lot 49.
Reunited with Burgess shortly after the death of his wife in March 1968, she abandoned her academic career in Cambridge and they married six months later. Liana was 38, Burgess 53; Paolo Andrea, newly legitimised, was four years old.
Determined to avoid the punitive 90 per cent income tax imposed on high earners by the Labour government, the trio embarked on a life of restless travelling in a Bedford Dormobile.
While Liana drove - often dangerously - through France and across the Alps, Burgess sat in the back of the van and clattered away at his typewriter, producing novels and film-scripts for Lew Grade and Franco Zeffirelli.
They settled briefly on Malta before setting out on a four-year tour of American universities. Burgess was a visiting professor at Chapel Hill, Princeton and City College in New York. Liana developed her talent for photography, and began an ambitious translation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake under the title pHorbiCEtta.
Driven by a belief that property was a sound investment, she bought houses in Rome, Malta, Bracciano, Callian, Siena, Lugano, Twickenham, central London and Monaco. Many of these residences were sparsely furnished, and some were left to stand empty for decades.
Her activities as an agent were equally unconventional. She refused to be loyal to any publisher, convinced that they were all motivated by greed and dishonesty.
Her 25-year marriage to Burgess was a remarkable literary partnership. Her translation of the Trilogia Malese - in which she found ingenious Italian equivalents for his bawdy, polyglot puns - was awarded the Premio Scanno prize.
As well as acting as his European agent from 1975, she translated Belli's blasphemous Roman sonnets for the novel Abba Abba.
She also appears in fictional form as the seductive Italian photographer Paola Lucrezia Belli in Burgess's autobiographical novel, Beard's Roman Women (1977).
When she sued the executive producers of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange for 10 per cent of the film's profits, this money allowed the family to establish a semi-permanent home on the rue Grimaldi in Monaco.
Living in a tax haven accorded with her strong belief that the earnings of writers should not be taxed under any circumstances.
Exiled in Monaco, Burgess often claimed that he had no friends except his wife, but he maintained that the small civilisation of their marriage was sufficient.
Liana was grief-stricken when he died from lung cancer in 1993, as she was when Paolo Andrea died suddenly in 2002; but she was sustained by her determination that Burgess's literature and music should not be forgotten.
As her health began to fail in recent years, she was looked after with great kindness by two close friends in Monaco, Gerard Docherty and Caroline Langdon Banks.
She leaves no surviving relatives, but her commitment to scholarship has led to the creation of the Anthony Burgess Centre at the University of Angers and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.