The Book Club Review
Wild Mary by Patrick Marnham
This detailed study of the author, Mary Wesley, was another
factual biography. The club had read The Camomile Lawn, her
most popular work, a few years earlier, and at the time thought
the racy and promiscuous life style it portrayed in 1930s /1940s
England rather far fetched. Now we have read the life of its
authoress, we are not so sure.
Mary was a descendent of the original Duke of Wellington, and
born with a silver spoon in 1912. The youngest of three, she
always felt neglected by her mother, but still had the financial
means and time to participate in the social whirl of London. She
had numerous lovers both before and after her first marriage to
Carol, who became Lord Swinfen. During the Second World War,
Lady Swinfen spent much of her time alongside another wellheeled female friend "entertaining" visitors at a large country
house in Cornwall. Married eventually to Eric, a failed author /
journalist, they endured a traumatic divorce experience at the
hands of his first wife. This lasted for years and included stalking
and physical violence. They became quite poor and scratched
out a living, while Mary’s brother-in-law did his best to ensure
matters stayed that way. After Eric’s suicide, she developed her
writing and managed to get a novel published at age 71 in
1983, and she then became very successful in her later years
with ten best sellers. She used thinly disguised episodes and
characters from her colourful past.
Marnham's detailed biography runs to 400 pages, in small type,
and was written after her death, with access to unpublished
letters. It manages to be dispassionate and non-judgemental,
following a chronological path, and indirectly a social history of
certain strata of England over many decades.
This work predictably attracted a wide range of views from our
book club members. The detail and complex network of Mary’s
friends, relations and acquaintances lost quite a few readers
along the way. This was not helped by the book’s length and
small print. It's a book which needs some time to read and
patience to understand, and we don't all have that luxury in the
four weeks between meetings. Only a few made it right through
to the end. Ultimately the reader needed a motive to plough on
- "after all the rampant sex, I started to lose interest" said
somebody.
Aspects which generated discussion in our group were the
damaged parental relationships, her promiscuity, her strange
choices of long term partners, her own very different children by
different men, the legal battles, the middle years’ poverty
followed by the late artistic flowering, and eventual celebrity
and affluence. While we were pleased she had succeeded in
the end, we could not help wondering about her judgements
along the way, and the sheer plausibility of some of it.
A couple of us felt some warmth for Mary, but most were left
quite unsympathetic. Very few felt inspired enough to seek out
and read one of her novels. Views on the biographer were also
mixed. While he had probably done justice to his subject in
academic terms, this had probably been at the expense of
entertaining a wider readership.
The book scored predictably low, with just two of us giving it
marks above the half-way point. It thus maintained our club's
tradition of not really getting on with biographies unless we have
a particular interest in the subject. Nevertheless, this title
generated a lively discussion and speculation, which many
works of fiction fail to do.
Page Turner
Next Month: Choral Society by Prue Leith