Born Mary Aline Siepmann in Englefield Green, Surrey

Mary Aline Siepmann was born on 24 June 1912 in Englefield Green, Surrey, England. She was the daughter of Colonel Charles Alexander Siepmann and Violet Bernice Dalby. Her father was a career army officer, and her upbringing was typical of the British upper-middle classes of the era, with an emphasis on propriety and a lack of formal higher education for girls.

Educated at home by governesses and briefly at a finishing school in Switzerland, she received no university education, something she later regretted and which fuelled her lifelong appetite for self-education through reading. Her childhood was emotionally distant; she often described her relationship with her mother as cold, and she felt like an outsider within her own family.

This early sense of alienation, combined with the social upheavals she would witness through two world wars, shaped the sharp, unsentimental, and often subversive perspective on English class and sexual mores that later defined her novels. Though she would not publish her first adult novel until she was seventy years old, the observational skills and social insight she developed during this repressed, aristocratic upbringing became the raw material for her celebrated late-blooming literary career.