Women, says Henry Pulling's Aunt Augusta in Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt, "are wiser than men. They think of the period that must elapse between one love-making and another." Each time dear Aunt Augusta rips out one of these maxims, we share in the frisson of shock that is registered by her tame and reticent bank-manager "nephew." "The fact that he was a married man didn't worry me at all, for I am not in the least a jealous woman. ... I have always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine. ... I am all for a little professional sex." Most arresting of all, nearly flattening poor Henry completely, is when the old lady is sighing over the loss of her hefty black valet and exclaims, "I can support his absence, though I may regret him for a while tonight. His knackers were superb." Aunt Augusta! What are you saying? As Henry ruefully concludes, "Apparently she had come first to Brighton when she was quite a young woman, full of expectations which I am afraid were partly fulfilled."

Mary Wesley—who has been compared by critics to everybody from Jane Austen to Muriel Spark—seems to me to be making a bid to be the Aunt Augusta of our day. In her best-known novel, The Camomile Lawn, a respectable woman of advanced years employs a mild swearword at one point and her driver raises his eyebrows. "In his book middle-class old ladies did not swear, not in their eighties." Oh, but they do. They also have lifetimes of sexuality to look back upon, and even try to prolong. They are notorious for their egg-sucking capabilities. Why shouldn't they talk dirty, have flings, and pass on a tip or two?

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There is no special reason why women of this type, both factual and fictional, should tend to be English (just think of Auntie Marne), but something in the genre seems to call for a British accent. Perhaps it reinforces the contrast between supposed sweet gentility and sudden raunch. Or sudden ruthlessness—one thinks of Miss Marple. At any rate, an image has had time to mature in the cask over the years, and it is distilled from elements of the officer's wife in India, parts of the rural eccentric cat lover, bits of the lady missionary, and perhaps a hint of Bertie Wooster's Aunt Dahlia, with a tincture of Lady Bracknell (who, by a nice coincidence, was Algernon's Aunt Augusta).

She treats of bedroom threesomes, the molestation of children, and the question of the female "rump."

Mary Wesley has in her time been an officer's daughter (her mother was a Wellesley, a descendant of the Duke of Wellington, and her father fought with Kitchener at Omdurman), a debutante, a baroness, a 30s bohemian, a housewife, and a penniless widow. It was in the last of these capacities that, at the age of 67, she wrote a novel and called it Jumping the Queue.

It was rejected by a number of publishers, who weren't interested in an unknown woman stuck down in the West of England. Then one day, just like William Boot in Scoop, she received an invitation to come up to the capital. It was from Macmillan. Again like William Boot when Lord Copper asked him to go and report from Africa, she declined the invitation. And, amusingly enough, for precisely the same reason. "For one thing, I couldn't possibly afford the fare." No, no, said the publishers. You don't understand . . . They paid her way to town, and knocked her down with a feather by offering an advance. It wasn't a very big one, but it removed her from the immediate threat of penury. Seven novels later, in 1990, A Sensible Life earned her $160,000 up front. Her ninth, An Imaginative Experience, is getting a major push and promotion in the U.S. from Viking this month.

To descend from the train at Totnes station in South Devon—the station where Mary Wesley was once too broke to stand herself a ticket—is to step into a stretch of deep England. Here the soil is a dark red, and farmers' markets hundreds of miles away sell vegetables unwashed so that customers can see the authentic Devon clinging richly to the roots. Wild ponies roam the moors, hedgerows narrow the lanes and domesticate the fields, cider is more alcoholic than any beer and most wine, and burring voices call the visitor "M'darling" or "M'dear" without discrimination. It's the world of Lorna Doone and Sir Francis Drake, Conan Doyle's Baskervilles and Silver Blaze. It's also the world of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, where the placid tone of village life is a cover for shotguns, rustic incest, rape, and blood sports. There isn't much violence in Mary Wesley—though the presence and memory of wartime is essential to her atmosphere. But there is a great deal of sex. In the innocuously named Camomile Lawn, set largely in the beauty of the West Country, she treats of bedroom threesomes, lesbianism, the molestation of children, adultery, and the question (so nice to see it phrased like this) of the female "rump."

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Meeting me in a pub which is named for the Norman castle that surmounts the town, she walks me briskly back to her cottage through cobbled streets lined with the sort of post-medieval buildings the English love to "list" for their architectural preservation. And sure enough, but with a twist to it, "here's my garage, which is the only listed garage in England. And watch out for that cat. I adore cats, but this one shits on my path in a very uncatlike way." Inside is everybody's idea of the perfect country retreat. On a landing upstairs is the writing desk. After a brief tour she sits in an armchair and puts her feet up, and it's possible to appreciate even in this lovely miniature room how tiny she is. She looks like a snow-haired cherub, a cherub with a sexy laugh and a shrewd look.

It would be tempting to start asking about the sex scenes right away, just in order to get this cherub to say "rump" or perhaps even . . . But I spent my boyhood in this part of the world, and the decencies must be observed. So I ask her about the Spanish Civil War. It seems to fascinate her. It crops up in A Dubious Legacy and in The Camomile Lawn, and my guess is that it must mean something to her. "Well, absolutely. I was brought up to be a proper little Conservative, but in the 1930s I fell in with people from the London School of Economics who were terribly excited about stopping Fascism. Some of them went to fight in Spain. Actually, I'm still very anti-Tory. The whole legacy of Mrs. Thatcher is absolutely ghastly. She's ripped out the whole spine of the country by destroying the miners and the coal industry. And the wasting of the talents of the young is simply awful." The most obtrusive public building in Totnes, apart from the castle and the church, is the Conservative Club ("I know, isn't it frightful?"), so I ask if she doesn't feel a bit isolated. "Not at all. I'm always after them. A few winters ago it was so freezing that I really thought an old couple near me would die of cold. So I rang up the local Tory member of Parliament and asked him to do something. Do you know, he told me he was having the greatest difficulty getting enough fuel for himself! So I went out and diverted a coal truck to make an urgent delivery to these people. I don't think they ever got a bill. That M.P. has gone now—he was never sober—and the new one replies to my letters as if I was half-witted. He never forgets to say that he enjoys my books, which rather makes me spit."

This is how she sounds, this sweet old lady with whom it's unwise to trifle. And I remember that I am, after all, talking to the former Baroness Swinfen, who was photographed in full regalia at the 1936 coronation.

Like many "gels" of her young day, Mary Wesley got married basically to please her parents. Lord Swinfen, however, turned out to be a rather serious mistake. "I realized it halfway through the ceremony." Having done the decent and expected thing by furnishing him with a son and heir, she ran off pregnant to the West Country and had what she recalls as a good war. Essential to all her memories and to most of her fiction is the acknowledgment (seldom made with more honesty, but known to many) that wartime is erotic. "If there's a war I'll sleep with you before you get killed. That's what maidens did in books and I am a maiden." Thus one of her novelistic heroines, speaking hoarsely and keenly to a young man back from Spain.

"If the weather's good I swim or sunbathe. I always suspect my editors of praying for rain."

The blackout in the London blitz, the shortage of men, the shortage of time, the subliminal relation between death and danger and the libido—well-bred young women were continually surprising themselves and others at this point in history. Mary Wesley went one better than even the most venturesome fillies and really appalled her family (not to mention her husband) by choosing this moment to fall in love with a half-German scribbler and man of principle named Eric Siepmann (with whom she lived until he died in 1970). You have only to register the halftones of her voice, even now, to know that this was love all right.

"He was . . . generous. He wept with delight when my children's book was published, even though he'd had no luck with his own books, and no luck with editors. He was too candid, and a bit of a boozer, as well as a walker-outer of jobs if there was a quarrel. Now I can travel and do anything I want. But I've got nobody to travel with. I wish I had had these opportunities earlier." How does one convey the absence of self-pity in a conversation like this? Ms. Wesley simply states the case as a plain matter of fact. She also says enough for one to guess penetratingly where she got her nostalgia for the sexual life. I wish I had met this Siepmann. He must have been quite a chap. "Yes, he was. He wrote one volume of memoirs—I think there's a copy left in the British Museum—called The Confessions of a Nihilist. It described his life up until the point he met me. He destroyed the second volume because of all the lawsuits it would have caused." Golly. About the lawsuits she's vague, but again one may surmise. Having been cut out of several wills for marrying a beastly German, and having had a demand from an aunt to return all the family lace at once, Mary Wesley has an educated sense of the litigiousness of the British ruling class. It shows in many of her themes and titles: Not That Sort of Girl, A Sensible Life, and A Dubious Legacy are perfect evocations of a certain kind of carrying patrician voice, and her characters are forever barking their shins on disputed manors, inheritances, and bloodlines.

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A crucial, not to say central, character is that of Calypso Grant. She makes an appearance in several of the novels, almost like Anthony Powell's Pamela Flitton, as the sex symbol or exterminating angel of an entire set and generation of people. In The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (which is to be televised in England this spring as part of a swelling tendency to put Wesley on the screen), Calypso stresses "the inadvisability of family interference, however well-meant." As she ages prettily throughout the cycle of fiction, busting a heartstring here and a dull marriage there, and winning sullen avowals from young and old Englishmen as they leave for the battlefront, one gets a sense of Calypso. It's possible to imagine her, later in life, stepping out into a snowstorm to redirect a coal truck in piercing notes that will brook no argument.

What are the consolations, and what are the remorses, of success in old age? She once told an interviewer, "When I turned 40, I went to bed and sulked for a day. No one took any notice, so I got up again. I haven't thought about age since." Bravely said, but not really true. She's healthy, and spry, and very fine-looking, and composes in a non-crabbed longhand. ("If the weather's good I swim or sunbathe. I always suspect my editors of praying for rain.") But sometimes the stoicism gives way to a mild but decided regret. "The future becomes bloody small at my age, and I get bloody tired. I have no ambitions beyond finishing the next book." She regrets not having learned more about the appreciation of music, which is continually stressed in the novels and which is the food of sex to more than one of her heroines. (It features strongly in Second Fiddle as well as The Camomile Lawn, and supplies a motif in other stories too.) "Yes, you're right, it does matter to me. And it's mattered to all the men I've really loved, and it's been the way to my heart. And I'd like to try and educate myself but ..." The phrase completes itself.

What, then, for a buck-up and a tonic? "Whenever I need cheering up, and want to remind myself of what real writing is, I reread one of three books. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark. And Travels with My Aunt, by Graham Greene." You don't say? "Yes, I love Marquez and I also adore Isabel Allende. I really wish I could travel to Latin America, but ..." Actually, it was Aunt Augusta I was thinking about.

And Aunt Augusta, of course, observed cuttingly—in reply to the question "Are you really a Roman Catholic?"—"Yes, my dear, only I just don't believe in all the things they believe in." I had slightly expected Mary Wesley, who can't bear the Tories and who bangs on in her books no less than her life about the horrors of English snobbery and English bigotry (particularly anti-Semitism), to be a staunch atheist. But no. "Both Eric and I became Catholics. He found it through Dostoyevsky. I came to it because I loved the theater and music of the church, and the Latin. Of course, the present Pope is terrible and I can't stand people like Mother Teresa, but I do go to Mass every week even though there's no Latin anymore. I remember the priest who told us we could join even though we both had living ex-spouses. He was magnificent and bright and handsome. I said to all my friends, 'What a lover that man would have made.' "

I clear my throat, put down my teacup, bid farewell, and begin the march through traditional Devonian rain back to the railway station. There's a wonderful evening light in these parts, as the estuary of the river Dart goes on the ebb and the castle and the spires darken over the town. There's no local garishness to brighten the sky, and the ancient quays and landing stages are much as they looked when the local peasantry was fortifying them against invasion in 1940, or for that matter 1588. The more ambitious local pubs have begun to advertise misspelled Tex-Mex dishes next to the ossified shepherd's pie on the blackboard menus, just as Mary Wesley includes a female character who likes to make love (actually, she doesn't call it that) while keeping her Walkman on. Thus does deep England try to keep pace, not without successes. But what can it be like, at this dusk and in the evening of your days, to be solitary and celebrated, and to finally have both money and a room of your own?