Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley, who has died aged 90, amazed the literary world by having her first novel, Jumping The Queue published when she was 70, in 1983. She went on to write nine more - three of which were filmed for TV - figured regularly in the bestseller lists, and was appointed CBE in 1995.

She often claimed that her novels were not autobiographical, but aspects of her life are reflected in the themes that run through her work. A typical Wesley heroine is a young woman, damaged by parental dislike or neglect, who ties herself to a conventional man who does not understand her, only to find happiness later with an eccentric, tender lover, who values in her all the qualities no one else has recognised.

The third child of Colonel Harold Mynors Farmar and his wife, Violet, Mary Aline was born at Englefield Green, Windsor Great Park. She grew up hardly knowing her father and believing that her mother preferred her elder sister. It was assumed that she would never have to work for her living and so she was not sent to school, which added to her isolation. Her minimal education was left to a series of foreign governesses. Regretting her lack of education, in the 1930s she attended lectures on international politics and anthropology at the London School of Economics (60 years later she was awarded an honorary fellowship).

She married Lord Swinfen in 1937. Having given birth to two sons, she had fulfilled her parents' expectations, only to scandalise them when she left her husband. They were divorced in 1945. The second world war, which was to form the background to many of her novels, changed everything for her.

She once told an interviewer that the war years gave her generation a very good time - "an atmosphere of terror and exhilaration and parties, parties, parties".

In 1944 she met playwright and journalist Eric Siepmann, who she married in 1952. He wrote in his autobiography, Confessions Of A Nihilist, that she was "somebody whom I really loved, who believed in God, and who thought that loving meant what you give and not what you take".

Their years together were so happy that Siepmann's death in 1970 devastated Wesley. She felt as though she had been cut in half "like a carcass at the butcher's".

His death left her bereft and without an income. She had been writing for years but had no confidence in what she produced, in spite of her husband's encouragement, and threw most of it away. Her first published works, in 1968, were Speaking Terms and The Sixth Seal, children's books - a third, Haphazard House followed in 1983.

It was only after Siepmann's death that she found her voice. Then, in Jumping the Queue, she wrote about a woman who could not bear to go on living after her beloved but eccentric husband's death and planned a suicidal picnic.

Her work soon found a wide public and was admired by critics. Wesley's readers revelled in the mixture of jokes, emotional pain, eccentric relationships and fast-moving narrative that she offered.

Much was made of the fact that the novels are full of illicit sex and that the characters are free with the sort of four-letter words that few women of Wesley's age and class would use even in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Perhaps more interesting, although it was less remarked by critics at the time, is the hate and violence her books contain beneath their charming surfaces. Several of her heroines kill, from Mathilda in Jumping The Queue to Sophie, the unloved but deeply lovable child of The Camomile Lawn (1984) - a TV film in 1992 - who pushed a paedophile coastguard off the cliffs in Cornwall.

After The Camomile Lawn came Harnessing Peacocks (1985 and a TV film in 1992), The Vacillations Of Poppy Carew (1986 and filmed in 1995), Not That Sort Of Girl (1987) Second Fiddle (1988) A sensible Life (1990). A Dubious Legacy (1993), An Imaginiative Experice (1994) and finally Part Of The Furniture (1997). A book about the West Country with photographer Kim Sayer, Part Of The Scenery was published in 2001. She had two sons by her first marriage and one son by her second.

· Mary Wesley (Mary Aline Mynars Siepmann, writer, born June 24, 1912; died December 30 2002