DARLING POL

Edited by Patrick Marnham

(Vintage £10.99, 336 pp) THE novelist Mary Wesley found late-blooming fame, admiration and success with the publication of her novel Jumping The Queue when she was 70 years old.

A wonderful creative flowering followed, with bestselling novels such as The Camomile Lawn and Harnessing Peacocks. But her life until that point had been one of high drama, encompassing both privilege — her first husband was Baron Swinfen — and lengthy periods of penury with her second husband, Eric Siepmann, the talented, but self-destructive, love of her life.

Before her death in 2002, Wesley entrusted Patrick Marnham, her biographer, with a carrier bag of her correspondence with Eric, compiled here to reveal a great love story veering from bliss to tragedy, but in which the protagonists’ passion remained unwavering.