"My first husband would never make up his mind in less than five years, so I used to get him to think that whatever course of action needed to be taken was his idea. Then he'd go right ahead." -- Mary Wesley
Mary Wesley, CBE (24 June 1912 — 30 December 2002) was an English novelist. She reportedly worked in MI5 during World War II. During her career, she became one of Britain's most successful novelists, selling three million copies of her books, including 10 best-sellers in the last 20 years of her life.
"A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring.""Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.""I always read that men don't like intelligent girls, but I've always found the reverse.""I don't write for any particular kind of person.""I found out only recently that we were making an index of enemy code signs.""I have a garden, and I'm passionately interested in young people.""I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.""I never really know the title of a book until it's finished.""I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldn't have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals.""I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.""Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse.""In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.""It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.""It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country.""Looking back, I understand that I was teaching myself to write.""My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.""Of course risk-taking does not always pay off, but it's a lot of fun!""People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.""Rebecca is an example of how not to manage men. The rules of the game never change, it requires subtlety.""That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.""They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises.""Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn't afford to run a car.""Unimaginative people are spared quite a lot. They're often much happier, because they don't go through all the variety of conceptions of the person they love.""We all lie to each other, present some sort of front.""We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.""Women's courage is rather different from men's. The fact that women have to bring up children and look after husbands makes them braver at facing long-term issues, such as illness. Men are more immediately courageous. Lots of people are brave in battle.""Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.""You know what it's like to persuade a pigheaded child to do something they don't want to. If they hear the same suggestion from someone else, they'll go right off and do it."
Mary Aline Mynors Farmar was born in Englefield Green, Surrey, the third child of Colonel Harold and Violet Mynors Farmar. As a child, she had 16 governesses. When she asked her mother why they kept on leaving, she was reportedly told "Because none of them like you, darling."
She had three sons by three different men. Her first husband was Carol Swinfen Eady (the 2nd Baron Swinfen) with whom she had a son Roger (now Lord Swinfen). She had an affair with the Czech war hero Heinz Ziegler, with whom she had Toby Eady, who became the literary agent of her biographer Patrick Marnham. She then had a son, William Siepmann, with her second husband, Eric Siepmann. Wesley became an author late in life after the death of Eric Siepmann left her nearly impoverished.
Mary Wesley had a lifelong complicated relationship with her family and especially with her mother. She had a sharp tongue. Following the death of her father in 1961, her mother said: "I'm not going to let that lingering death happen to me. When the time comes I'm going to crawl to the Solent and swim out". She replied with feeling: "I'll help you".
Her family didn't approve of her books. Her brother called what she wrote "filth" and her sister, with whom she was no longer on speaking terms, strongly objected to The Camomile Lawn, claiming that some of the characters were based on their parents. . She identified the appalling grandparents in Harnessing Peacocks, who bully the pregnant Hebe, as the nearest she came to a portrait of her own parents in old age.
She wrote three children's books, Speaking Terms and The Sixth Seal (both 1969) and Haphazard House (1983), before publishing adult fiction. Since her first adult novel was published only in 1983, when she was 71, she may be regarded as a late bloomer. The publication of Jumping the Queue in 1983 was the beginning of an intensely creative period of Wesley's life. From 1982 to 1991, she wrote and delivered seven novels. While she aged from 70 to 79 she still showed the focus and drive of a young person.
Her best known book, The Camomile Lawn, set on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall, was turned into a television series, and is an account of the intertwining lives of three families in rural England during World War II. After The Camomile Lawn (1984) came Harnessing Peacocks (1985 and as TV film in 1992), The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1986 and filmed in 1995), Not That Sort of Girl (1987), Second Fiddle (1988), A Sensible Life (1990), A Dubious Legacy (1993), An Imaginative Experience (1994) and Part of the Furniture (1997). A book about the West Country with photographer Kim Sayer, Part of the Scenery, was published in 2001. Asked why she had stopped writing fiction at the age of 84, she replied: "If you haven't got anything to say, don't say it."
Her take on life reveals a sharp and critical eye which neatly dissects the idiosyncrasies of genteel England with humor, compassion and irony, detailing in particular sexual and emotional values. Her style has been described as "arsenic without the old lace". Others have described it as "Jane Austen plus sex", a description Mary Wesley herself thought ridiculous. As a woman who was liberated before her time Mary Wesley challenged social assumptions about the old, confessed to bad behaviour, recommended sex. In doing so she smashed the stereotype of the disapproving, judgmental, past-it, old person. This delighted the old and intrigued the young.
In Wesley's books there are some references to her own life, although she denied that her novels were autobiographical. Her books usually take place in or around the everlasting house, the idyllic refuge, recalling her time with Siepmann, living in a remote cottage in the West Country. Other recurring themes such as the dysfunctional family, the uncertain paternity, the affirmation of illegitimacy, can also be linked to her own life. In addition, thanks to her flighty youth, sex would become her trademark in her books though she wrote about what went on in the head rather than a user's manual. Incest also plays a part in several of her novels, but Wesley never mentioned this as a feature of her own life. She may however have gained her insight from her years working as a Samaritan.
Only in the last year of her life did she agree to a biography being written. She cooperated fully with Patrick Marnham, on the condition that nothing would be published prior to her death. She provided her reminiscences from her sick bed, and commented "Have you any idea of the pleasure of lying in bed for six months, talking about yourself to a very intelligent man? My deepest regret was that I was too old and ill to take him into bed with me". The authorised biography (published in 2006), was titled Wild Mary, a reference both to her childhood nickname, and to her sex life as a young woman, when she had many lovers. In her biography nothing is held back: "It was a flighty generation" ... [W]e had been brought up so repressed. War freed us. We felt if we didn't do it now, we might never get another chance". "It got to the state where one woke up in the morning, reached across the pillow and thought, 'Let's see. Who is it this time?'" But Wesley finally did get tired of her wartime lifestyle, she realized that her way of life had become too excessive: "too many lovers, too much to drink...I was on my way to become a very nasty person". When her son Toby Eady read the book, he was so amazed at how much he did not know about his mother that he did not speak to anyone for a week.
Late in life Wesley ordered her own coffin from a local craftswoman and asked it be finished in red Chinese lacquer. She kept it as a coffee table for some time in her sitting room. She suggested that she was photographed sitting up in it for a feature in the magazine Country Living - it was politely declined.
