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 reviews for her fiction, although her novels were sometimes unjustly perceived as
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Citation: Turner, Nick. "Mary Hocking". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 December 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13873, accessed 26 April 2024.]
