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 these photographs Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is shown 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, which has released them to the Guardian to mark and celebrate Aung San Suu Kyi's 65th birthday tomorrow.

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 at all, and this week the UN working group on arbitrary detention pronounced her continued detention a breach of international human rights law. The current excuse for her imprisonment is that she breached the conditions of her last house arrest, when an uninvited American man with mental health problems took it upon himself to swim across the lake to visit her home.

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, right, 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, "the lair of the pregnant tigeress", 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 here 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 don marrying the beautiful young woman with a nation's hopes on her slim shoulders. In the background of one shot is a stern sign ordering guests not to celebrate with confetti or rice.

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 from British colonial rule.

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 shows her outside the Oxford terrace where the family lived, and where Burmese exiles still visit today. Three other pictures show family holidays in the UK. One, taken in Grantown-on-Spey in the Cairngorms, 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 eating 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 paternal grandfather's house in Grantown-on-Spey.

In another photo the future leader of the Burmese Democracy Movement is tending a barbecue on the Norfolk Broads, where the family were enjoying a narrow boat holiday with friends. Within 10 years she was back in Burma, leaving them all behind in order to fight 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."