She is known to the world as a human rights activist who has spent 14 of the last 20 years under house arrest as punishment for demanding democracy in her home country. But in newly-released photographs Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi show her not as the fearless campaigner who has given up her liberty for the sake of her nation, but as a young woman in love and a doting mother. Many of these pictures come from the private collection of her late husband, the Oxford academic Michael Aris, who died from prostate cancer in 1999. Almost all are today published for the first time, and now belong to the private Aris family trust, who released them to the Guardian to mark and celebrate Aung San Suu Kyi's 65th birthday on June 19.

As she has done for most of the past two decades, the Nobel laureate will celebrate not with her two sons and family, but in her crumbling villa on University Avenue in Rangoon, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers. Under the terms of her current imprisonment she will not be released until early 2011, though many of her supporters fear Burma's military rulers will find, yet again, a new spurious reason to keep her locked away once she has served her term.

The United Nations believes she should not be imprisoned, and this week the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention pronounced her detention a breach of international human rights law.

Perhaps the most striking picture in the collection shows Aung San Suu Kyi walking down a snowy track in the mountains of Bhutan. She could easily be a young girl of 13 in her oversized Tibetan gown and boots and men's gloves, but this picture was taken in January 1971, when she was 25 years old and already an established figure at the United Nations, where she worked in New York (and where her Burmese passport was issued).

The Bhutan photo marks a milestone in her life she has just accepted a proposal from Michael Aris, who was then working as a tutor to the Bhutanese royal family. She had flown from the US to the landlocked Himalayan country to visit her beloved, and on a trip to visit Taktsang, a complex of temples which make up one of the oldest and most sacred shrines in Bhutan, Aris proposed.

They married on New Year's Day the following year. Pictures show the couple in the London registry office where their marriage was made official before being blessed at a private Buddhist ceremony at a friend's home. The workaday surroundings belie the extraordinary union — the Oxford academic marrying the beautiful young woman with a nation's hopes on her slim shoulders.

Other images come from the next stage in Aung San Suu Kyi's life, when she has become a mother. The family were living in Oxford by then, as Michael researched Tibetan and Bhutanese studies, and one shot records their first visit back to Burma after the birth of their first son, Alexander, in 1973. Alexander is in the arms of his grandmother, Daw Khin Kyi, widow of General Aung San, the Burmese revolutionary who was instrumental in bringing about Burma's independence.

In 1977 Aung San Suu Kyi gave birth to her second son, Kim, and devoted much of her time and energy to motherhood. One photograph here shows her outside the Oxford house where the family lived, and where Burmese exiles still visit today. Three other pictures show family holidays in the UK. One, taken in the Scottish mountains, could show any other late 70s family on a typically chilly British picnic. Everyone is bundled up in thick jumpers or coats, surrounded by Tupperware and munching sandwiches. Another Scottish scene takes place in more clement weather, as Aung San Suu Kyi bends down to speak to her two boys, playing on the croquet lawn at their grandfather's house.

In another photo the future leader of the Burmese Democracy Movement is tending a barbeque in Norfolk, eastern England, where the family were enjoying a boating holiday with friends. Within 10 years she was back in Burma, fighting for what she believed in. It was her destiny, she said, and her family accepted it before her marriage to Michael Aris, she told him “I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service