The dangerous edge of things

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If her name rings a bell at all, Mary Wesley, who died aged 90 in 2002, is remembered for two things: publishing the first of ten successful novels at the age of 70, and knowing a surprising amount, for a ladylike senior citizen, about sex. Even her greatest fans, though, might wonder if she rates a serious, full-length biography, and why a well-regarded writer and journalist like Patrick Marnham, who has previously produced books on Simenon, Diego Rivera and Jean Moulin, should choose her as a subject. All such carping questions can be put aside immediately. This biography is pure pleasure, a riveting, hilarious tragicomedy of manners.

Mary Wesley was born Mary Farmar, and her forebears were soldiers from the Anglo-Irish gentry. Her pen name reflects her ancestry: her great-great-great-grandfather, the older brother of the first Duke of Wellington, became Governor General of India and changed his name from Wesley to Wellesley. As a child she was spirited and rebellious and felt less loved than her more biddable brother and sister; nicknamed ‘Wild Mary’, when she asked why her governesses, 16 of them, never stayed long she was told, ‘None of them liked you, darling.’ Families, to her, were dangerous places.

When she grew up, she became even wilder, despite being presented at court three times before three monarchs (George V, Edward VIII and George VI). Her first lovers were suitable young men from good schools and good regiments; ‘God, when I think of the time I’ve wasted going to bed with old Etonians’, she remarked later. But during the 1930s her subversive nature and the mood of the times drew her towards kindred spirits, like the upper-class communists John Platts Mills and Lewis Clive: she worked in a canteen for the unemployed, and took a course in International Relations at the LSE.