Wild Mary

I've been hanging onto Wild Mary, the biography of Mary Wesley, for some time while I read a few of her novels to get a sense of where she might be coming from. But wow, the story of her life beats the novels hollow (and now I'm keen to read the rest and see what else made its way into her work).

Born in 1912, Mary Wesley found her writing career late in life -- her first adult novel was published when she was 70, and she wrote about nine more (all bestsellers, with TV adaptations and international sales etc) before she died. After a few decades of grinding poverty, she was catapulted into sudden wealth: a dream come true!

Mary Farmar was born into a genteel military family. Her father was the British liaison with John Monash's Australian regiment, and he landed with the Australian troops at Gallipoli. But, with some justification, she felt neglected by her parents and older siblings, and rebelled with a defiant adolescence and young adulthood (this is where she picked up the nickname 'Wild Mary').

She made a conventional marriage into minor nobility, but the marriage was not a success, and the couple drifted apart during the Second World War. Mary was working for British Intelligence and had quite an adventurous time, with many lovers and entanglements before she met her second husband, Eric, with whom she remained until he died. (They were friends with Nancy Mitford.) But Eric had a truly ghastly wife, who stalked and harrassed them for years until they managed to shake her off, and the strain of this reign of terror took its toll on Eric's own mental health.

Eric aspired to be a writer, but never really had anything published. It makes you wonder what Mary might have been able to achieve if she'd had the freedom to write earlier... There was another complicated family scandal later on when a nasty solicitor tried to get Mary's second son disinherited so that he could take control of the whole estate. By the time Eric died, Mary was on the bones of her arse, ill herself, contemplating suicide, having to sell her house which she could no longer afford to live in -- and then her manuscript, Jumping the Queue, was accepted for publication and everything changed. (Jumping the Queue is about a widow contemplating suicide after the death of her husband.)

Mary's books struck a chord because they combine the recklessness and adventurous spirit of youth with the experience and cynicism of old age. They can be really dark at times -- there's incest, betrayal, violence and deception -- and yet they have an exuberant devilry about them which is kind of thrilling. With such rich and racy material to draw from, thank god 'Wild Mary' didn't succeed in 'jumping the queue' after all.