Mary Wesley

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Mary Wesley CBE (actually Mary Aline Mynors Farmar ; born June 24, 1912 in Berkshire , Great Britain , † December 30, 2002 in Totnes , Devon ) was a late-working British writer. All ten of her by no means trivial social novels became bestsellers, making her one of the most widely read authors in England in the 1990s.

Life

The daughter of a British colonel , according to her biography, led a relatively wild, dissolute life in her youth. In the 1930s she studied political science and cultural anthropology at the London School of Economics . She eventually married Baron Charles Swinfen Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen, with whom she had two sons. After his untimely death, she remarried. From this affectionate marriage with the author Eric Siepmann came another son. When her second spouse fell ill with Parkinson's and died in 1970, she had published two children's novels the year before and was left with almost no wealth as a widow. She had to completely reinvent herself, worked for the Samaritans , an English psychosocial welfare organization, and threw herself into writing in her spare time. A close friend encouraged her to get through the rejection of the publishers until James Hale of Macmillan Publishers accepted her novel Jumping The Queue . A detective radio play, which was produced by Deutschlandfunk Kultur and premiered in April 2014 , was created under the title Matildas last summer , edited by Andrea Czesienski and directed by Steffen Moratz .

From 1983 the then 71-year-old published another book for young people and ten novels for adults in quick succession. When asked why she stopped writing novels at the age of 84, she said: "If you have nothing more to say, keep quiet." In 1995 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 2001 she published a non-fiction book about south-west England, Part of the Scenery , to which the photographer Kim Sayer contributed the pictures. In the last year of her life, she decided to make a biography possible about her eventful, unusual life. She, who was mostly bedridden at the age of 89, met with the author Patrick Marnham for over half a year, gave him two shoeboxes with personal letters and notes, told her life and answered his questions. The book authorized by her was published under the Tiel Wild Mary , the nickname of her young years, by Chatto and Windus Verlag.

stylistics

Her descriptions of the milieu showed a keen and critical eye that cleverly analyzes the peculiarities of the English middle class with humor, passion and irony and, contrary to Victorian prudery, emphasizes certain gender and emotional values. Her stylistic approach with explicit sexuality delighted the elderly and amazed the younger ones.

Her best-known book The Camomile Lawn , which is set on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall , became the literary model for a television series in 1992. It is about the difficult life of three families in rural England during the Second World War.

Works

Children's and youth novels
  • Speaking Terms (1969)
  • The Sixth Seal (1969)
  • Haphazard House (1983)
    • The secret of Haphazard House . From the English by Lutz Brütt; Hille publishing house, Hamburg
Novels
  • Jumping The Queue (1983)
  • The Camomile Lawn (1984)
  • Harnessing peacocks (1985); -> British television film 1992.
  • The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1986); -> British TV film 1995.
  • Not That Sort of Girl (1987)
    • Lead me not into temptation . German by Benjamin Schwarz; List, Munich 1993. 357 pp. ISBN 978-3-471-79150-9 .
  • Second Fiddle (1988)
  • A Sensible Life (1990)
  • A Dubious Legacy (1992)
  • An Imaginative Experience (1994)
  • Part of the Furniture (1997)
Autobiographical
  • Part of the Scenery (2001)
  • Darling Pol: Letters of Mary Wesley and Eric Siepmann 1944-1967 (2017)

literature

  • Patrick Marnham: Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley . Chatto and Windus. ISBN 0-7011-7991-0 .

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ a b Obituary Mary Wesley , The Guardian, January 1, 2003, accessed April 14, 2018
  2. ^ Detective radio play : The art of taking your own life: Matildas last summer , Deutschlandfunk Kultur, accessed April 14, 2018
  3. ↑ Wild Mary: a life of Mary Wesley, by Patrick Marnham , reviewed in The Independent, June 8, 2006, accessed April 14, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Wesley, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Farmar, Mary Aline Mynors (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British novelist
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Berkshire
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2002
Place of death Totnes