Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley

The extraordinary life of novelist Mary Wesley who, in her 70s\nand 80s, wrote ten amazingly sexy novels, includingThe Camomile\nLawn, which was made into a TV series. Born Mary Farmar (Wesley was\na pen-name, derived from the family name of Wellesley), descended\nfrom the Duke of Wellington, she grew up a rebel, believing that\nshe was her mother’s least favourite child. Like many girls of her\nbackground, she married for escape, although her first marriage (to\nLord Swinfen) was conventional. Her second husband, Eric Siepmann,\na writer who never managed to make any money at all, was feckless\nand bohemian. In between Swinfen and Siepmann, she had a love\naffair with Czech war hero, Heinz Ziegler — and possibly with his\nbrother at the same time; and in her later years enjoyed a torrid\nrelationship with Robert Bolt. At the outbreak of the Second World\nWar she was, as she put it, “roped into intelligence,” where she\nworked on breaking codes. Her experiences in MI5, and her many\nwartime love affairs, which form the core of this biography, also\nformed the cores of her novels. Mary Wesley published her first\nnovel when she was 70, and went on to write nine more bestsellers\nbefore her death in 2002 at the age of 89. She, herself, selected\nPatrick Marnham as her biographer.

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