In 1970, Wesley was left in relative poverty by the death of her second husband, Eric Siepmann, from Parkinson’s disease and she took to writing childrens’ books to support herself.  She subsequently became one of Britain’s most successful novelists, a particularly impressive achievement given that she only started publishing adult novels in the last twenty years of her life.  The themes of her, later, adult novels included dysfunctional families, uncertain paternity and illegitimacy and often revolve around a particular house or country location.

Her most famous, semi-autobiographical, novel ‘The Camomile Lawn’, led to family breakdown with her sister claiming particular characters were based on their parents and grandparents. Set on the Roseland Peninsula, the novel related the intertwining lives of five cousins, the members of three families, during the Second World War and was inspired by her time at Boskenna, the estate of the Paynter family, following her separation from her first husband, Lord Swinfen.

Wesley had an extraordinary childhood and was also, apparently, a distant mother. 

With a father she hardly saw and an unloving mother she was, essentially, brought up by a succession of nannies from Britain but also from the continent leading her to become fluent in English, French, Italian and German.  At one point as, a small child, Wesley’s mother left her to live for three months in a hotel in Brittany with her, then, current nanny.  By the age of fourteen, Wesley had had sixteen different nannies.  When she asked her mother why she had had so many, her mother’s blunt response was ‘Because none of them liked you, darling’.  When Wesley was fourteen she was sent to boarding school, followed by finishing school in Paris after which she was presented at court.  When she asked why, after having so many nannies, her parents had sent her to boarding school, her mother replied  ‘It’s because we ran out of nannies and we don’t like you either, darling’. 

A committed socialist, perhaps because of the rejection of her extremely conservative parents, Wesley studied International Politics at the LSE, worked in a soup kitchen and attended Communist Party meetings. As Lady Swinfen, Wesley attended the Coronation of George VI but desperate to escape her marriage, in 1940, she took their son to Boskenna from where she telephoned her husband to announce their separation.

During the World War II she divided her time between Cornwall and London where she worked decoding German ciphers.  Her son spent his early years at Boskenna under the care of Colonel Paynter J.P. who was rumoured to organise  the black market in Cornwall.  Consequently, he grew up feeling both fatherless and motherless, a situation which was aggravated when he was sent to boarding school at the age of seven. 

In later life, Wesley lived in Devon and died of cancer in 2002.