Mary-Kay Wilmers

Mary-Kay Wilmers, Hon. FRSL Hon. FBA (born 19 July 1938) is an American editor and journalist. She was the editor of the London Review of Books from 1992 to 2021, and she remains consulting editor. Her mother, Cecilia Eitington, was of Russian-Jewish descent, and her father's family were, she said, "very English", but 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 Charles Wilmers was President of Sofina, a Belgian multinational utilities holding company. Wilmers was educated in Brussels and at boarding school in England. She said that for some time she was happier speaking French than English.

At Oxford University, where Wilmers studied modern languages at St Hugh's College from 1957, she befriended Alan Bennett, later a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Bennett said about Wilmers's time at university: "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 due to her threat to not sit the exams.

Career

Early career 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, employed at first as a secretary. The new review was an offshoot of The New York Review of Books, at first appearing folded inside the older publication. The first edition appeared in October 1979.

The New York Review of Books withdrew its support after a few months, and in May 1980, Wilmers made the first of a number of investments of money inherited from her father, establishing an independent London Review of Books and later making herself the majority shareholder.

As an editor, Wilmers has been closely associated with the work of a number of novelists and essayists, including Alan Bennett, John Lanchester, Jenny Diski, Blake Morrison, Alan Hollinghurst, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Colm Tóibín, Stefan Collini, James Wood, Linda Colley, Jacqueline Rose, Paul Foot, Tariq Ali and Edward Luttwak. Many of these were published prominently when at the beginnings of their careers. An article by the Cambridge historian Mary Beard, published after the events of September 11, 2001, attracted some attention for suggesting that "America had it coming",

Honours A book of tributes to Wilmers, Bad Character, was published privately in June 2008 and distributed as a limited edition. In 2017, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, as well as being honoured with their Benson Medal. In 2018, she was elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy.

Personal life In 1968, Wilmers married film director Stephen Frears, with whom she had two sons, Sam and Will. They lived on Gloucester Crescent in Camden Town, London. Frears left Wilmers while she was pregnant with their second son Will in the early 1970s, and the couple divorced. Nina Stibbe, the live-in nanny whom Wilmers hired in the early 1980s, wrote letters home that described the North London "literati" life; these were compiled, published, and adapted into the 2016 TV series Love, Nina.