The extraordinary life of Mary Wesley, whose first novel was published when she was 70 years old. She worked for British Intelligence during the war, and her 70s and 80s packed in the writing and publication of 10 amazingly sexy novels. Her books -exciting, innovative and bestselling - include THE CAMMOMILE LAWN, which was also made into a TV series.
Patrick Marnham was born in Jerusalem, educated at Oxford and is a member of the English Bar. He is the author of eleven books, has been translated into seven languages and has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Prize, the Marsh Biography Award, and was nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1994. He started his career as a reporter on Private Eye and has contributed to many newspapers including The Times, Daily Telegraph, Observer, New York Times and Washington Post. He has been literary editor of the Spectator, was the first Paris correspondent of the Independent, and has worked as a BBC scriptwriter and broadcaster and as a special correspondent and war reporter.
Much of the fascination of Marnham's well-researched and admirably
impartial book is that it reveals just how autobiographical
Wesley's fiction was
*Sunday Times*
[A] fast-paced riveting biography
*The Times*
A striking portrait not only of an amazing, if strange, woman but
of an entire social class
*Evening Standard*
Unpicks the complicated web of deceits and half-truths that
surrounded much of her life with wit, patience and skill, providing
just the sort of compelling read that Wesley did in her novel
*Independent*
This biography is pure pleasure, a riveting, hilarious tragicomedy
of manners... Marnham has disentangled truth from rumour, clarified
the many connections between Wild Mary's rackety life and Mary
Wesley's fiction, and produced a generous, unsentimental and
intelligent portrait of a woman's life and times
*Spectator*
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