The case of the writer who only reaches maturity with the necessary creative drive, self-confident and free from family ties to carry out her work is not uncommon. But the one of the British Mary Wesley (Surrey, 1912 – Devon, 2002) acquires special characteristics. She wrote throughout her life, but it was not until she was 70 years old that she, forced by economic hardship, conceived one after another a dozen light and sparkling novels on the surface but much deeper than it may seem, with an ironic and malicious style that only belongs to her, although traces of companions in the row like Muriel Spark and a bit of the narrative economy of Ivy Compton-Burnett are detected.
Wesley’s novels achieved significant success in the 1980s, boosted in the press by the rarity of an author who, entering old age, dedicates herself to recounting, with proud exhibitionism and a certain elegant frivolity, the sexual liberation that it meant for her generation and, especially for women. upper class women, the years of the second world war. If the conflict turned everyday life upside down, it was only natural that the old Victorian conventions would begin to crack. That’s what it’s aboutchamomile grass’, his second and most popular novel originally published in 1984 and now rescued by Alba. A story that follows a group of young male and female cousins and their friends on holiday in the old manor house of the young uncles in Cornwall, on the edge of a cliff, with the lawn of the title at their feet (the chamomile not only serves for infusions it can also be an ornamental plant), the summer of 1939, aware that the imminent war will be the end of innocence for all of them.
The narrative unfolds in two times, that glorious past and a present in which all those involved, now older, attend the funeral of Max, a celebrated Austrian and Jewish violinist who found refuge in England and was the sexual catalyst for most of the events. female characters in the story. Women who wake up in the morning and have to stop to think, without guilt or concern, who is that person who accompanies them in bed. So without drama, pure lightness.