Lucy’s teenage years were marked by interpersonal difficulties with her family and a simultaneous struggle to pass her entrance examinations to Oxford and Cambridge. Though Lucy received private coaching in mathematics, the subject she wanted to study at university, she was not able to achieve a place at one of her preferred schools. It was not until 1970 that she was accepted on a course in anthropology and politics at the University of Kent. 

In 1972, Lucy was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia, as her father had been years before her. While John Russell had the support of his mother, Dora, to fall back on following his first hospitalization, Lucy appears to have had few support networks in her adult life. Nonetheless, she made plans for her future, as all young people do. Her notes and diary entries emphasize her desire for emotional and financial stability and the preservation of a harmonious  interpersonal environment. Her notes also speak to her desire to resolve the inner turbulence caused by the absence of her mother. In one long prose piece, Lucy writes about Susan’s signification as a mother. While the piece begins from a place of abstraction, it concludes with a moving personal enjoinder to herself: “We have Susan; we have our necessary identity because of her, we have the appearance of the rejecting mother [. . .] Rejection of Susan as usual, as useful, resulted in chaos. I have to say I am her daughter [. . .] I can understand, but I can’t forgive. What can I do to mend the hole? Make a woman, where a mother should be, a person in whole.”