Mary McMinnies

Mary McMinnies was born Mary Jackson on June 13, 1920, in Madras, India. Her parents were Yorkshire Quakers. Mary was sent to England at the age of seven, living during both terms and holidays with her brother at a small school in Buckinghamshire and returning there for holidays even after she entered the Friends' School at Saffron Walden, Essex, at thirteen. At sixteen she went to Munich to perfect her German. A year of acute boredom followed, studying French in the home of a dentist's family at Aix-en-Provence. In 1939 she married Gordon Winter, assistant editor of Country Life. They had a son. In 1945 she went to Vienna as an interpreter for the Allied Commission to Austria; in 1946 she went on her own to Cairo, then to Beirut to fill a job with the British Legation news department. In the autumn she left for Athens to work again for H.M.G. at the Embassy, and on September 15, 1947 she married John McMinnies, then third secretary. In 1949 they were posted to Cracow, in 1950 to Warsaw, later to Bologna, in 1953 to Malaya. On a hilltop in Johore she wrote her first published novel, The Flying Fox (Harcourt, 1957). (Her first, written at twenty-one, was summarily rejected; Hutchinson & Company's reader considered it "pornographic"). The Visitors (Harcourt, 1958) was written in an eight-by-ten-foot bedroom in London.

(Shorter version of biography found in https://archive.org/details/currentbiogr195900mori/page/281/mode/1up )