WILD MARY: THE LIFE OF MARY WESLEY.
Publisher: CHATTO & WINDUS; Chatto & Windus
Published: 2006-07-18
Place of publication: LONDON
Language: und; eng
Number of pages: 289
Description: "Mary Wesley published her first novel in 1983 when she was seventy years old - and went on to write nine bestsellers, including The Camomile Lawn, which was made into a TV series." "Wesley was a pen name, derived from the family name of Wellesley. She was born Mary Farmar, related to the Duke of Wellington, and grew up a rebel who believed that she was her mother's least favourite child. Like many girls of her background, she married for escape. She herself summarised the pre-War years as 'God! When I think of the time I've wasted going to bed with old Etonians.' Her first marriage (to Lord Swinfen) was brief and conventional. In the late 1930s, she began a fascination with Heinz Ziegler, a Czech university professor and wartime air gunner; his brother, Paul, later a Benedictine monk, also fell under her spell. In 1944, she met her adored second husband, Eric Siepmann, a writer who never managed to make any money at all from writing. Their marriage, which was mercurial and bohemian, lasted until his death. In her later years she enjoyed a relationship with playwright Robert Bolt." "At the outbreak of the Second World War she was, as she put it, 'roped into Intelligence', where she worked on breaking codes. MI5 and her rackety life during the Blitz eventually inspired her novels, many of which were concerned with multiple wartime love affairs. She wrote about the atmosphere of the home front and how the imminence of death loosened inhibitions - her fiction was as sexy and as candid as she was herself. She drew on her eccentric friends and her love of Cornwall and the West Country, while the darkness in her novels was illuminated by a caustic sense of the ridiculous. Her style has been described as arsenic without the old lace."--Jacket.