Mary Hocking

Notable Works

• The Winter City (1961)
• The Mind has Mountains (1976)
• Good Daughters (1984)

About

Mary Hocking was born in London and educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls in Acton. She served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service in World War Two, after which she worked in the Middlesex Education Department until the success of her first novel The Winter City allowed her to move to Lewes, East Sussex to become a full-time writer. Between 1961 and 1996 Hocking published 24 novels. Her books feature central female characters and their relationships seen against a background of work and society. Most are contemporary, although He Who Plays the King (1980) is set in the last years of the Wars of the Roses. She wrote about women’s experience of the Second World War in her Fairley family trilogy – Good Daughters (1984), Indifferent Heroes (1985) and Welcome, Stranger (1988) – spanning several decades of the twentieth century; Letters from Constance (1991), an epistolary novel, covers the same period.

Originally published by Chatto & Windus, some of Mary Hocking’s titles were reprinted by Virago in the 1990s and recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in her writing among book groups and bloggers. Mary Hocking was a beneficiary of the RLF as well as a supporter.

Legacy

Mary Hocking died in 2014, aged 92. She was supported in later life by the RLF and we are grateful that her own gift of Copyright from her literary estate helps support future generations of writers.