Mary L Wesley

Harnessing Peacocks

A compartmentalized life becomes entangled.Hebe listens in the darkness of the hall to a family conference. Her stern grandfather and the others are discussing Hebe’s unexpected pregnancy. The decision, unanimous, is that it be terminated. Hebe, dissenting, flees into the night.Twelve summers later ...

A Sensible Life

She was a thin, lonely child with huge eyes and an extensive vocabulary of French foul language.  Amongst the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in Dinard in 1926--leading their privileged lives of secure routine pleasures--Flora was a ten-year-old misfit.  Ignored by her self-absorbed...

Harnessing Peacocks (King Penguin)

Mary Wesley creates one of the most enchanting heroines of recent literature in this story of independence, wit, and sensuality. Nineteen-year-old Hebe flees her family to avoid the forced abortion of her illegitimate child. What follows is at times poignant, touching, and in the end, surprising.

Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley

The authorized, and astonishing, biography of Mary Wesley.Descended from the Duke of Wellington, Mary Wesley grew up a rebel, believing that she was her mother’s least favourite child. Like many girls of her background, she married for escape, although her first marriage (to Lord Swinfen) was conven...

Jumping the Queue

Recently widowed, Matilda Poliport’s meticulously planned bid for graceful oblivion is foiled. Later she foils the suicide attempt of another lost soul, Hugh, on the run from the police, and life begins again for them both. But life also throws up nasty secrets and awkward questions, both from Matil...

The Camomile Lawn

A vivid picture of wartime London and Cornwall through the eyes of five cousins.Behind the large house, the fragrant camomile lawn stretches down to the Cornish cliffs. Here, in the dizzying heat of August 1939, five cousins have gathered at their aunt’s house for their annual ritual of a holiday. F...

Part of the Furniture

When Juno Marlowe finds herself caught in the middle of a London air raid, she is quickly rescued by an elegant gentleman who offers her shelter and a mysterious invitation to his father's country estate. The next morning he is dead, and she is once again alone with nowhere to go. At seventeen, Juno...

A Dubious Legacy

On a midsummer weekend in 1954 James and Matthew, two rather priggish young Englishmen, take their girls, Barbara and Antonia, away for a brief holiday at a friend's home in order to propose marriage. But no one is prepared for what unfolds--and will spin itself out over the next 40 years.

Jumping the Queue

Not That Sort of Girl

The Vacillations of Poppy Carew

Second Fiddle

Harnessing Peacocks

A Sensible Life

Dubious Legacy

An Imaginative Experience

Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley, CBE (24 June 1912 30 December 2002) was an English novelist. During her career, she was one of Britain's most successful novelists, selling...