The Camomile Lawn was published by Macmillan in 1984 — Wesley’s second novel but the one that made her famous, eventually selling over a million copies and being adapted into a 1992 Channel 4 television series. Wesley was seventy-one when it was published, and the novel’s sexual frankness (from a woman of that generation) was as much a part of its sensation as its literary quality.
The novel opens in August 1939 at a house on the Cornish coast, overlooking a camomile lawn that slopes to the cliffs. Five cousins are gathered for what they sense will be the last summer of the old world: Calypso (beautiful, amoral, calculating), Polly (practical, devoted), Oliver (homosexual, secretive), Walter (gentle, artistic), and Sophy (the youngest, watching and learning). The war transforms all of them — not through trauma (though trauma is present) but through liberation: the collapse of social rules allows each to become what peacetime would never have permitted.
Wesley’s treatment of wartime sexuality is radical: adultery is not punished but celebrated as a response to mortality; homosexuality is not tragic but simply part of the social fabric; and the women’s sexual autonomy — Calypso sleeping with men for money and pleasure without shame — is presented as a rational response to a world where death makes conventional morality irrelevant.
The novel moves between 1939 and the present (the cousins reuniting in old age), and the contrast between wartime freedom and peacetime constriction is the book’s central irony: the war, for all its horror, was when these people were most alive.
Collecting The Camomile Lawn
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1984): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $8–$15