[2] During her career, she was one of Britain's most successful novelists, selling three million copies of her books, including ten bestsellers in the last twenty years of her life.

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.

The authorised biography (published in 2006) is entitled Wild Mary, a reference both to her childhood nickname and to her sex life as a young woman, when she had many lovers.

'"[12] But Wesley finally did get tired of her wartime lifestyle, realizing that her way of life had become too excessive: "too many lovers, too much to drink...I was on my way to become a very nasty person".

[14] Late in life Wesley ordered her own coffin from a local craftswoman and asked it be finished in red Chinese lacquer.

[17] Wesley died from cancer on 30 December 2002, aged 90, at her home in Totnes, Devon and was buried beside her second husband in the graveyard of Buckfast Abbey.

[2] Her take on life reveals a sharp and critical eye which neatly dissects the idiosyncrasies of genteel England with humour, compassion and irony, detailing in particular sexual and emotional values.

[18] As a woman who was liberated before her time Mary Wesley challenged social assumptions about the old, confessed to bad behaviour and recommended sex.

Her books usually take place in or around the everlasting house, the idyllic refuge, recalling her time with Siepmann, living in a remote cottage in the West Country.

[4] She wrote three children's books, Speaking Terms and The Sixth Seal (both 1969) and Haphazard House (1983), before publishing adult fiction.

Her best-known book, The Camomile Lawn, set in the West Penwith area near St Buryan, although filmed on the Roseland Peninsula in Cornwall, was turned into a television series, and is an account of the intertwining lives of three families in rural England during World War II.