Mary Hocking
Mary Hocking (8 April 1921 - 17 February 2014) was a British writer who published 24 novels between 1961 and 1996.
Mary Hocking | |
|---|---|
| Born | 8 April 1921 |
| Died | 17 February 2014 (aged 92) |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Writer |
Hocking was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls, Acton, London. In World War Two she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service. After the War she became a local government officer in the Middlesex Education Department, where she worked until the success of her first novel allowed her to become a full-time writer and move to Lewes, East Sussex, where she lived for the rest of her life.[1]
Hocking's novels were published by Chatto & Windus. They are characterized by wit and irony, and their subject matter often includes central women characters and their relationships with families, or individuals seen against a background of work and society, with moral questions asked. Most of Hocking's novels are set in the contemporary world, although He Who Plays the King (1980) is a historical novel set in the last years of the Wars of the Roses. Her last novel, The Meeting Place (1996), included time-slip scenes. The Fairley family trilogy - Good Daughters (1984), Indifferent Heroes (1985) and Welcome, Stranger (1988) - is family saga spanning several decades of the twentieth century, including the Second World War; Letters from Constance (1991) is an epistolary novel that looks back over the same period.
Nick Totton commented about The Mind has Mountains in The Spectator: "Mary Hocking writes brilliantly on many levels at once, because she knows that the everyday contains another, stranger reality: it only takes attention, an at first casual intensification of vision, to open the crack between the worlds ... The Mind Has Mountains is a funny, serious book, to be read and reread: the kind of book that bides its time, perhaps remaining an innocuous entertainment for years until a reader is opened to it by explosive experience—'so that was what it meant!' It is a Steppenwolf for our time; and, I think, the equal of Hesse's."[2]
Mary Hocking died in 2014.
Novels
- The Winter City (1961)
- Visitors to the Crescent (1962)
- The Sparrow (1964)
- The Young Spaniard (1965)
- Ask No Question (1967)
- A Time of War (1968)
- Checkmate (1969)
- The Hopeful Traveller (1970)
- The Climbing Frame (1971)
- Family Circle (1972)
- Daniel Come to Judgement (1974)
- The Bright Day (1975)
- The Mind has Mountains (1976)
- Look, Stranger! (1978)
- He Who Plays the King (1980)
- March House (1981)
- Good Daughters (1984)
- Indifferent Heroes (1985)
- Welcome, Stranger (1988)
- An Irrelevant Woman (1987)
- A Particular Place (1989)
- Letters from Constance (1991)
- The Very Dead of Winter (1993)
- The Meeting Place (1996)
Further reading
- Review of A Particular Place in The London Review of Books
- Review of Letters from Constance by Anita Brookner in The Spectator
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