When Christine Maxwell published her first book nearly 30 years ago she was a 26-year-old teacher in an Oxfordshire primary school.

Sales hit 300,000 thanks, partly she admits, to the efforts of her father, the disgraced newspaper tycoon who plundered £440m from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers before falling to a watery death from his yacht.

Of the seven surviving Maxwell children it is Christine and her twin sister, Isabel, who seem to have been the most successful. The founding and selling of a pioneering internet search engine was reported to have made the twins wealthy before the internet bubble burst. At one point they entered The Sunday Times Rich List.

Maxwell was so proud of his daughter’s work that he hawked her Dictionary of (Purrfict Purfict Purfect) Perfect Spelling around the world, persuading publishing companies to buy foreign rights.

“My father would take the book and disappear on his travels, China, South Africa, India; he did very well with it,” Christine said last week, speaking from her home in France, where she now lives.

It was Maxwell’s publishing company, Pergamon Press, that published the dictionary; but this month, under her own steam, the 54-year-old mother of three is relaunching the dictionary — with an independent publisher.

The revamped edition is thanks, says Christine, to all the parents and teachers who swamped her with letters asking where poor spellers could get a copy.

The timing could not be better; so concerned is the government about standards of spelling that last week a Commons’ select committee announced a large-scale review of the way children learn to read and write, with an emphasis on the merits of “synthetic phonics”.

This is an imaginative way of introducing children to letters, words and sentences using sounds, and has proved so popular with teachers, academics and politicians that it has already been adopted by more than 300 schools in England and Scotland. Now there is growing pressure for the scheme to be rolled out nationwide.

Christine supports the move. “It makes perfect sense to start by teaching letter-sound correspondences, so that children can begin to construct words independently,” she says. “It can only benefit both their reading and spelling.”

At her Oxfordshire school she was “horrified almost daily by 40 hands going up asking, ‘Miss, how do you spell this word?’ I would say look it up in a dictionary but they couldn’t find the word because they didn’t know how to start spelling it.”

The idea behind the book is that even if you don’t know how to spell a word you can look up the wrong spelling and find the correct one printed alongside. So look up “larf” and you’ll find it with “laugh” next to it. Being able to use a reference book and do their own research is, says Christine, hugely empowering for children.

It’s taken nine months to revise the book, stripping out old- fashioned words such as “imbue” and “embroil” and updating with modern additions — all the words born of the net, for instance.

It’s still a family venture, too. Pandora, her sister-in-law, and her eldest daughter, Matilda, an Oxford undergraduate, helped edit the book and it’s being launched at a glitzy reception in London at the end of the month.

Will the reprint do as well without her father’s input? “He would be very proud today to see it come out,” she says. “One of the things he really cared about was education. God forbid if we came back with a bad school report.”