This months book club choice for the Swallow Bookworms is "Wild Mary" by Patrick Marnham.
It is a biography of Mary Wesley. I think when I voted for it to be included in this year's list I was thinking of Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles Wesley and was hoping for (if the book was well written and researched) a fascinating insight into the life of an educated woman in the eighteenth century and the influence she had on her sons' later thinking.
But it isn't Susannah; it's Mary, a woman whose books I do not like, and the little I know of her private life rather puts me off reading the book. And that leaves aside my distaste for biographies of the living and recently dead other than (some) autobiographies and - very occasionnally - loving memoirs by their children or spouses. (I don't include analysis of the public person's work in my distaste for biography - that is an entirely separate issue.) While not liking the books, I don't deny that Mary Wesley can write and, this being the case, if she wanted to tell all why didn't she write it herself?
Still, I haven't read it yet, so I may be surprised.
I was certainly surprised by reactions to last month's choice "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" which I thought would be universally liked, but which divided us (the female members - no man finished it) more strongly than almost any book we have had so far. One found it really too disturbing to read, another had on her social worker's hat and couldn't take the plot, while a third thought it was 'writing by numbers'. Those of us who liked it were willing to agree that some of the plotting stretched credulity, but felt tha it was a good light read to be enjoyed at a level somewhere between Maeve Binchy and Barbara Vine.
