Mary Wesley, the late-flowering author who told an interviewer last year she looked forward "with interest to the mystery of death", has died at the age of 90.

Ms Wesley, author of The Camomile Lawn and nine other novels written after she turned 70, had been ill with a blood disorder. She died on Monday at her home in Totnes, Devon.

One of her sons, the literary agent Toby Eady, said yesterday: "She was someone who started a new wave of writing. She was a deeply feminine woman who wrote about being a woman in a way that had not been done before."

Mary Wesley said of herself: "My chief claim to fame is arrested development." However, several of her novels are bestsellers and adapted for television. Her first, Jumping the Queue, came out in 1983. The Camomile Lawn, her first commercial success, set in the last summer before the second world war, was published the following year. "My grandchildren keep telling me I'm read on the tube," she said in a Guardian interview in 1990. "I simply can't believe this success, it seems to me idiotic."

She felt a lifelong insecurity because her parents had her educated only by a governess. But she was proud to be seen as a writer who had liberated pensioners from prejudice.

"I remember being young. When do you forget it? When do you forget thinking about sex? Sex is in everything. In music, in poetry, in painting, you name it. I don't think anybody would have noticed my writing about it had I been younger."