Wild Mary: a life of Mary Wesley Patrick Marnham Chatto & Windus, 304pp, £18.99 ISBN 0701179910

Illegitimacy, sibling rivalry, adultery, poverty, wartime intelligence work, a family inheritance dispute of Jarndycean complexity, a vengeful former wife on the rampage and religious conversion - Mary Wesley's life provided plenty of material for the novels that suddenly made her famous at the age of 70. The sexual relationships she explored in her fiction were drawn from experience; a great part of Patrick Marnham's biography is taken up with charting her lovers. By the time she reached middle age, Wesley found counting them more effective as a cure for insomnia than counting sheep.

She was born Mary Farmar in 1912 into an upper-middle-class family painfully conscious that it had missed out on the money enjoyed by previous generations. On her mother's side, she was descended from the Wellesleys, the family of the 1st Duke of Wellington - hence her choice of Wesley as her writing name. She felt that her mother didn't want her; her army officer father was more loving, but was unable to show it. Her brother Hugh was the beloved heir; her sister Susan, though a prig, was the favourite. With a modicum of education (though good French, as her mother once left her for three months in a Brittany hotel), Wesley threw herself into the 1930s. It was fancy-dress parties, dancing, tennis, visits to Europe and assignations at the Ritz. She married what her parents would have called "well": to Carol, the 2nd Lord Swinfen. It is not entirely clear why she chose him ("no one liked him much", recalled a friend, and Wesley called him a "crashing bore") but the prospect of a title may have swung it - she was "wild" in quite a conventional way. As it turned out, Lord Swinfen showed remarkable forbearance and generosity, turning a blind eye to scores of lovers and raising his wife's second son, Toby (whom he knew was not his), as his own. The two sons were later divided by a vitriolic lawsuit when Roger, the elder, tried to disinherit Toby on the grounds that he was illegitimate.

In the late 1930s, Wesley first visited Bos kenna, the magical clifftop house and estate of the Paynters in Cornwall. Colonel Paynter entertained girls he brought down from the Windmill Theatre, and Betty Paynter (the colonel's daughter) and Wesley entertained - apparently in a pretty undiscriminating fashion - officers stranded there during the war. Wesley fell in love with one of them - the charismatic Czech intellectual and airman Heinz Ziegler, who was later shot down and killed. Many years later, his brother Paul, another lover, became a Benedictine monk and played a large part in Wesley's decision to convert to Catholicism.

But the great love, the one who put an end to all the other men for good, was Eric Siepmann. He was brilliant, articulate, creative - but a "failed writer", a man "boiling" with ideas yet apparently incapable of seeing them through. From the moment he picked Wesley up in the Ritz in 1947 and she went back with him to his hotel, they remained together - much of the time in grinding penury and, in the early years, being stalked by Siepmann's deranged wife - until his death 23 years later.

Despite all the dramas and the lovers (recounted by Marnham in scrupulous detail), this portrait of Mary Wesley really comes alive only towards the end, when her novel Jumping the Queue is accepted by a publisher and her fortunes turn. Until this point, there are too many unanswered questions, too many characters incompletely coloured in, and Marnham picks gingerly around Mary's troubled relationship with her sons (it perhaps doesn't help that Toby Eady - her second son - is Marnham's agent). But as Wesley enters her seventies and embarks on a new life, new friendships and an affair with Robert Bolt, she suddenly comes into focus. Marnham talks to those who knew her then, and acknowledges those inconsistencies in her character that have at times strained the reader's understanding. Even so, Wesley kept her life and friends in strict compartments, and a full picture remains elusive.

Wesley had a gift for friendship, but she also kept her enemies into old age. At her sister's memorial service in 1985 she remarked, with the studied bravado of the black sheep: "I feel so sorry for poor Susan. She never knew the joys of soixante-neuf."

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