Mary Wesley
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 1990
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week's Desert Island Discs castaway is novelist Mary Wesley. Although she has written poetry and prose throughout her life, it was not until she was a widow in her 70s, struggling to make ends meet, that she had her first book, Jumping the Queue, published. That was eight years ago, and since then she has gone on to write six more best-sellers like The Camomile Lawn and Not That Sort of Girl. Mary Wesley will be talking to Sue Lawley about the pleasures and perils of her late arrival to literary fame and choosing eight records to accompany her to her desert island.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Symphony No 7 - Final Movement by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Luxury: Denis Healey or large double bed with pillows
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a novelist. |
| 0:34.4 | Throughout her life she has written prose and poetry which was consigned to the waste paper bin or simply lost with the passage of time. |
| 0:38.1 | It wasn't until she was 70, a widow struggling to make ends meet, that she finally found a publisher and her first |
| 0:44.9 | book jumping the cue went into print. That was eight years ago. She's written another |
| 0:50.0 | six bestsellers since, the Cammer lawn harnessing peacocks, not that sort of girl. |
| 0:55.4 | Stories of strong-minded, often well-bred women who are unafraid to defy convention. |
| 1:00.9 | A description perhaps of their Creator. |
| 1:03.0 | She is Mary Wesley. |
| 1:05.0 | Mary has eight years been long enough to come to terms with fame and fortune or do you still have to pinch yourself on occasions to believe it? |
| 1:12.0 | No, it's all a very big surprise and goes on being an |
| 1:14.5 | enormous surprise. Same old me inside, people say oh you must be feeling so |
| 1:18.9 | wonderful, you know so successful and so on and I even occasionally trip over a sort of |
| 1:24.8 | of all in people and I say for God's sake shut up it's the same only me in size |
| 1:29.0 | no difference so has it made no difference to you is obviously financially |
| 1:32.2 | financially it's made a difference. |
| 1:33.8 | I no longer cringe at the sight of the electricity bill. |
| 1:37.8 | But what about you as an individual if it hasn't changed you fundamentally? |
| 1:41.7 | Has it made you more confident or more |
| 1:44.3 | relaxed? No I don't think I'm any more confident than I ever was I'm an absolute snail |
| 1:48.9 | I'm terrified inside. Well now writing is a lonely business so I dare say to that extent you will relish being alone on the desert |
... |
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