18 Facts About Mary Wesley

Mary Aline Siepmann CBE, known by the pen name Mary Wesley, was an English novelist.

Mary Wesley had a lifelong complicated relationship with her family and especially with her mother, who had a sharp tongue.

Mary Wesley's brother called what she wrote "filth" and her sister, with whom she was no longer on speaking terms, strongly objected to The Camomile Lawn, claiming that some of the characters were based on their parents.

Mary Wesley identified the appalling grandparents in Harnessing Peacocks, who bully the pregnant Hebe, as the nearest she came to a portrait of her own parents in old age.

Lewis Clive fell in love with Mary Wesley and asked her to marry him.

Mary Wesley's first husband was Charles Swinfen Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen, with whom she had a son, Roger Swinfen Eady, 3rd Baron Swinfen; although her son Toby Eady, born in 1941, was initially known as the son of Lord Swinfen, Mary Wesley subsequently admitted his father to be the Czech political scientist Heinz Otto Ziegler.

Mary Wesley next married Eric Siepmann and with him had a third son, William Siepmann.

In 1970 Mary Wesley was left impoverished by the death of Siepmann, and it was only then that she became an author, turning to writing as a way to restore her finances.

Mary Wesley cooperated fully with Patrick Marnham, on the condition that nothing would be published before her death.

Late in life Mary Wesley ordered her own coffin from a local craftswoman and asked it be finished in red Chinese lacquer.

Mary Wesley kept it as a coffee table for some time in her sitting room.

Mary Wesley suggested that she be photographed sitting up in it for a feature in the magazine Country Living, but the idea was politely declined.

Mary Wesley was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1995 New Year Honours, for services to literature.

Mary Wesley died from cancer on 30 December 2002, aged 90, at her home in Totnes, Devon and was buried beside her second husband in the graveyard of Buckfast Abbey.

Mary Wesley's style has been described as "arsenic without the old lace".

Incest plays a part in several of her novels, but Mary Wesley never mentioned this as a feature of her own life.

Mary Wesley wrote three children's books, Speaking Terms and The Sixth Seal and Haphazard House, before publishing adult fiction.

Mary Wesley's best-known book, The Camomile Lawn, set in the West Penwith area near St Buryan, although filmed on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall, was turned into a television series, and is an account of the intertwining lives of three families in rural England during World War II.