Book description
Laura Thornby is independent, individual and perfectly in control of
her life. Her affairs are brief but delightful, her career fulfilling
and she copes with her two rather peculiar relatives and the gossip
about her parentage with wryness and humour.
But then she meets twenty-three-year old Claude, a struggling
writer, and she is overcome by an irresistible desire to interfere,
manipulate and experiment - all for his own good, of course.
What Laura does not foresee, however, are the possibilities that one
day Claude may actually complete his novel and that she may well fall
in love.
Mary Wesley was born near Windsor in 1912. Her education took her to
the London School of Economics and during the War she worked in the War
Office. Although she initially fulfilled her parent's expectations in
marrying an aristocrat she then scandalised them when she divorced him
in 1945 and moved in with the great love of her life, Eric Siepmann. The
couple married in 1952, once his wife had finally been persuaded to
divorce him. She used to comment that her 'chief claim to fame is
arrested development, getting my first novel [
Jumping the Queue
] published at the age of seventy'. She went on to write a further nine
novels, three of which were adapted for television, including the
best-selling
The Camomile Lawn
. Mary Wesley was awarded the CBE in the 1995 New Year's honour list and
died in 2002.
