Event Information

The Truth about Fiction - the role of the biographer

Date: 19 June 2006   Drinks: 18:30   Talk Starts: 19:30 OPuS Event

Review - Post Event

A fine evening….. no football… and yet again a fascinating summer event for OPuS at Headington Hill Hall on 19 June. Patrick Marnham’s biography of Mary Wesley, ‘Wild Mary’, was published on 1 June and broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’.

Patrick was accompanied by his editor, Penny Hoare, the Deputy Publishing Director of Chatto & Windus (an imprint of Random House), and Fiona McMorrough, who runs her own marketing and publicity company. Between them, our three guests gave a compelling insight into what it means to write, edit and publicise a book about a successful novelist. Patrick described how he felt he had to get at a true complete picture of Mary Wesley. This initially seemed straightforward, as the novelist had invited him to be her biographer, and because there was plenty of raw material in the form of a draft autobiography and some diaries. But Mary Wesley apparently lived her life in separate compartments, and getting at and connecting the truth of each part proved the challenge. Penny Hoare was modest about the editorial role she had played, though she had clearly given criticism as well as praise during the book’s evolution. And Fiona McMorrough talked about the way she had had to manage publicity so that newspapers did not impose their own agenda on a published book.

It was an altogether captivating occasion. The biography and some of Mary Wesley’s novels were on sale, and Patrick Marnham signed copies of the biography. ‘Wild Mary – a life of Mary Wesley’ is published by Chatto & Windas at £18.99 and is already in its fourth reprint.

Richard Balkwill June 2006

Description

Patrick Marnham, author of Wild Mary – the life of Mary Wesley

Penny Hoare, Deputy Publishing Director of Chatto & Windus

As the biographer of a successful novelist, the talk will focus on the challenge of writing about someone who died only recently. How does an author balance the life and the literature? Is the result a review of the life, or of the subject's novels, or both - and what's the link?

Patrick Marnham’s latest book, Wild Mary, was published on 1 June, and is currently Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’. It documents the extraordinary life of Mary Wesley, whose first novel was published when she was 70 years old. She worked for British Intelligence during the war, and in her 70s and 80s packed in the writing and publication of 10 amazing novels.

Mary Wesley herself selected Patrick Marnham as her biographer. She gave him numerous interviews before her death in 2002, and also passed him her diaries and private papers, and authorised her relations and friends to talk openly to him. He is the biographer of Georges Simenon and Diego Rivera; his books have won the Thomas Cook Travel Prize and the Marsh Biography Award; and he has written for Private Eye, the Independent and the Spectator.