Imprint: Vintage
Published: 03/05/2007
ISBN: 9780099498179
Length: 336 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm
Weight: 234g
RRP: £11.99
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
Published: 03/05/2007
ISBN: 9780099498179
Length: 336 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 21mm x 129mm
Weight: 234g
RRP: £11.99
Much of the fascination of Marnham's well-researched and admirably impartial book is that it reveals just how autobiographical Wesley's fiction was
[A] fast-paced riveting biography
A striking portrait not only of an amazing, if strange, woman but of an entire social class
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
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