Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Wesley
-
Standard Name: Wesley, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Aline Farmar
Pseudonym: Mary Wesley
Married Name: Mary Aline Eady
Titled: Mary Aline Eady, Lady Swinfen
Married Name: Mary Aline Siepmann
MW
won some notoriety by beginning her writing career proper at the age of seventy, when she published her first novel for adults. After this she kept up for some time the rate of one new book a year. (Before this she had published two of her three novels for children and drafted several adult works.) Late in life she added a volume that combines memoir with topographical writing. Her comic, satirical fiction, in which middle-aged or elderly female protagonists look back at their early lives (often shadowed by war) and reflect on sexual indiscretions (often still continuing), won her very great if not enduring popularity; she became known for sexually explicit writing, in comic or horrific, non-idealised style. Patrick Parrinder
regards her as a last celebrant of the vanishing life of the English upper and upper-middle classes.
Parrinder, Patrick. “Mizzlers”. London Review of Books, 26 July 1990, pp. 19-20.
Chitty, Susan. Now To My Mother. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985.
137
Early in the war, as she gradually moved closer to the Church, she wrote...
Friends, Associates
Graham Greene
Personal friends who were Catholics or converted to that faith during the course of their friendships with Greene included Muriel Spark
, Antonia White
and the future writer Mary Wesley
.
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Oakley
This is the first of AO
's novels without a central female protagonist; and the result is a certain lack of focus. The story is set at a resort on the coast of Turkey...
Reception
Antonia White
AW
had used Sylvaine's name for a fictional actress flourishing some years before the real June Sylvaine was born. Her publisher, Eyre and Spottiswoode
, played safe by withdrawing copies of the book. The case...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Wesley, Mary. A Dubious Legacy. Bantam; Viking, 1992.
Wesley, Mary. A Sensible Life. Bantam; Viking, 1990.
Wesley, Mary. An Imaginative Experience. Bantam; Viking, 1994.