His father then attempted to sue the Parkes family for "the custody, control and society" of his wife and two sons (including Wyndham's younger brother, the writer Vivian Beynon Harris), in an unusual and high-profile 1913 court case, which he lost.

[3] The case, which re-exposed previous allegations of sexual impropriety, pre-dating his marriage, left Wyndham's father a broken man.

[3] After leaving school, Wyndham tried several careers, including farming, law, commercial art and advertising; however, he mostly relied on an allowance from his family to survive.

[8] During these years he lived at the Penn Club, London, which had been opened in 1920 by the remaining members of the Friends Ambulance Unit, and which had been partly funded by the Quakers.

The intellectual and political mixture of pacifists, socialists and communists continued to inform his views on social engineering and feminism.

They embarked on a long-lasting love affair, and obtained adjacent rooms in the club, but for many years did not marry, partly because of the marriage bar under which Wilson would have lost her position.

[1] He was attached to XXX Corps, which took part in some of the heaviest fighting, including surrounding the trapped German army in the Falaise Pocket.

His pre-war writing career was not mentioned in the book's publicity and people were allowed to assume that this was a first novel from an unknown writer.

[15][16][17] This is set in the far future of a post-nuclear dystopia where genetic stability is compromised and women are severely oppressed if they give birth to "mutants".

She wrote an introduction to a new edition of Chocky in which she states that the intelligent alien babies in The Midwich Cuckoos entered her dreams.

Brian Aldiss, another British science fiction writer, disparaged some of Wyndham's novels as "cosy catastrophes", especially The Day of the Triffids.

Hurst commented that in Triffids the main character witnesses several murders, suicides and misadventures, and is frequently in mortal danger.