Mary Wesley - Background

Background

Mary Aline Mynors Farmar was born in Englefield Green, Surrey, the third child of Colonel Harold Mynors Farmer and his wife Violet nee Dalby. As a child, she had 16 governesses. When she asked her mother why they kept on leaving, she was reportedly told "Because none of them like you, darling."

She had three sons. Her first husband was Carol Swinfen Eady (the 2nd Baron Swinfen) with whom she had a son Roger Mynors Swinfen Eady, 3rd Baron Swinfen. She had an affair with the Czech war hero Heinz Otto Ziegler, with whom she had Toby Eady, who became the literary agent of her biographer Patrick Marnham. She then had a son, William Siepmann, with her second husband, Eric Siepmann. Wesley became an author late in life after Siepmann's death in 1970 left her nearly impoverished.

Wesley had a lifelong complicated relationship with her family and especially with her mother. She had a sharp tongue. Following the death of her father in 1961, her mother said: "I'm not going to let that lingering death happen to me. When the time comes I'm going to crawl to the Solent and swim out". She replied with feeling: "I'll help you".

Her family didn't approve of her books. Her 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. 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.