English writer, 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 style has been described as “arsenic without the old lace” and “Jane Austen plus sex.”
She wrote three children’s books before publishing adult fiction. Her best-known book, The Camomile Lawn (1984), set 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.
Wesley’s first husband was Charles Swinfen Eady, who later became Baron Swinfen, and with him she had two sons, Roger Swinfen Eady, 3rd Baron Swinfen, and Toby Eady, who was eventually the literary agent of her biographer Patrick Marnham. She married secondly Eric Siepmann and with him had a third son, William Siepmann.
In 1970 Wesley was left an impoverished widow by the death of Siepmann, and it was only then that she became an author, turning to writing as a way to restore her finances.
Late in life Wesley ordered her own coffin from a local craftswoman and asked it be finished in red Chinese lacquer. She kept it as a coffee table for some time in her sitting room. She suggested that she be photographed sitting up in it for a feature in the magazine Country Living, but the idea was politely declined.
She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1995. Wesley died from gout and a blood disorder on 30 December 2002, aged 90, at her home in Totnes, Devon. Asked why she had stopped writing fiction at the age of 84, she had replied: “If you haven’t got anything to say, don’t say it.”
Link to Wikipedia biography