Mary-Kay Wilmers
| Mary-Kay Wilmers | |
|---|---|
| Born |
19 July 1938 Chicago |
| Education | Oxford University |
| Occupation | Journalist and editor |
| Known for | Editing the London Review of Books |
| Spouse(s) | Stephen Frears (1968–early 1970s) |
Mary-Kay Wilmers (born 19 July 1938) is an editor and journalist who has been the editor of the London Review of Books since 1992.
Mary-Kay Wilmers was born in Chicago and grew up in New York City. Her mother was Russian of Russian Jewish descent, while her father's family were, she said, "very English", although they had come from Germany. For many years Wilmers worked on a book, published in 2009 as The Eitingons: A Twentieth Century Story, recounting the story of her mother's Russian relations, including the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon, as well as her grandfather's cousin Leonid Eitingon, an agent in Joseph Stalin's NKVD who was responsible for masterminding the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
In 1946 Wilmers' parents moved to Europe, spending time in London, Portugal, Belgium and Switzerland. Her father established a utilities company that became a Belgian multinational. Wilmers was educated in Brussels and at boarding school in England. She said that for some time she was happier speaking in French than in English.
At Oxford, where Wilmers read modern languages at St Hugh's College from 1957, she became a friend of Alan Bennett, later a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, who said about her time at university that, "Outside the novels of Nancy Mitford or Evelyn Waugh, I had never come across anyone who behaved so confidently or in such a cosmopolitan fashion."
For the week of her finals she moved into the Randolph Hotel, staying with her father whose presence was required as Wilmers was threatening to refuse to sit the exams.
After her graduation in 1960, she thought about becoming a translator at the United Nations, but instead went to work at the publishers Faber and Faber, at first being employed as a secretary. On one occasion she thought she might be sacked for saying "bugger" in front of T.S. Eliot, whose letters she used to type up. She later became an editor at Faber and Faber, and, among many books, was responsible for commissioning Eva Figes to write Patriarchal Attitudes, one of the first books of British feminism. She left Faber aged 29 to become deputy editor of the Listener, edited by Karl Miller, and in the 1970s had a spell at The Times Literary Supplement (TLS).
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