Editions

Wild Mary: The Life Of Mary Wesley

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099498179

  • Length: 336  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 234g

  • RRP: £11.99

Wild Mary: The Life Of Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley published her first novel at seventy and went on to write a further nine bestsellers, including the legendary The Camomile Lawn, in a style best described as arsenic without the old lace. Many of her stories were inspired by her experiences during the Blitz, and by her marriages: the first to an aristocrat, a brief and conventional affair, and the second to a penniless writer she adored.

A remarkable book about a remarkable woman, Patrick Marnham's brilliantly researched and wonderfully impartial book disentangles truth from rumour, highlighting the links between Wesley's real life and her fiction.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099498179

  • Length: 336  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 234g

  • RRP: £11.99

Reviews

  • Much of the fascination of Marnham's well-researched and admirably impartial book is that it reveals just how autobiographical Wesley's fiction was

    Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times

  • [A] fast-paced riveting biography

    Valerie Grove, The Times

  • A striking portrait not only of an amazing, if strange, woman but of an entire social class

    Rachel Cooke, 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

More from this Author

About the Author

Patrick Marnham

Patrick Marnham was born in Jerusalem, educated at Oxford and is a member of the English Bar. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling Wild Mary, has been translated into seven languages and has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Prize, the Marsh Biography Award, and been nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award. 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.

Patrick Marnham

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