Mary Hocking, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetMary Hocking
British novelist
Date of Birth: 08-Apr-1921
Date of Death: 17-Feb-2014
Profession: writer
Nationality: United Kingdom
Zodiac Sign: Aries 
About Mary Hocking
- Mary Hocking (8 April 1921 - 17 February 2014) was a British writer who published 24 novels between 1961 and 1996. 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.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."Mary Hocking died in 2014.
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