Mary Hocking was born in 1921 into a Methodist family in London. In World War Two she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRENS), later becoming a local government officer in the Middlesex Education Department, where she worked until the success of her first novel, The Winter City (1961), allowed her to become a full-time writer and move to Lewes, East Sussex, where she lived until very late in her life. She died, after ill-health had forced her to move into a nursing home, in 2014.
Hocking’s novels were published by Chatto and Windus; at the time, she and Iris Murdoch were the only two women writers they published, indicating Hocking’s prestige. Throughout her career she garnered excellent …
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Citation: Turner, Nick. "Mary Hocking". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 December 2016 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13873, accessed 26 November 2024.]
