Lesley was born in Glasgow in 1967, and graduated with an MA in English Literature from the University of Glasgow in 1989. She then completed a PhD on James Joyce and Feminist Theory, entitled The Feminine Fictions of James Joyce in 1994, published academic articles and chaired panels at international conferences in Seville, Dublin, Toronto and Zurich. After two years of lecturing in the School of English at the University of St. Andrews, she became a full-time literary journalist, writing regularly for publications like The Herald, The Scotsman, The Independent on Sunday and The Times Literary Supplement.

In 2006, Lesley was shortlisted for the Scotsman/Orange Short Story award, with a story entitled ‘Dear Anne’, about Anne Frank’s diary, and in 2007 she published her first novel, The Picnic (Edinburgh: Black and White), about a grandmother who goes missing from a family picnic one day in Toronto in 1973, and the ramifications of that event for her daughter and granddaughter twenty years later in Scotland.

In 2008, another short story, ‘Aschenputtel 08’, an updating of the Cinderella story about a woman coping with two step-daughters, appeared in the collection, Cleave (Two Ravens Press). Lesley also won a Scottish Arts Council award towards the writing of her next novel, The Alienist, based loosely on the life of the childhood friend of Mary Shelley, a woman called Isabella Baxter Booth. The story of a woman who marries the wrong man, and a man who makes a catastrophic career choice, it is set in 1823 against the background of the emerging new science of psychiatry. 

In June 2008, Lesley signed a contract with Overlook Press, New York, for a non-fiction book about the relationships nine women writers from the twentieth century had with their male writing partners. Between the Sheets looks at the relationships of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, H.D. and Ezra Pound, Rebecca West and H. G. Wells, Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Lesley currently lives in Glasgow, putting the final touches to The Alienist, and reviewing for newspapers like The Financial Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Herald and The Scotsman.

 

She is also on the steering group for the monthly writers’ and publishers’ networking evening, ‘Weegie Wednesday’, held on the middle Wednesday every month upstairs at the Universal Bar, Sauchiehall Lane, Glasgow. She chairs panels at the Edinburgh Book Festival and the Milngavie Arts and Books festival, as well as occasional events like the ‘City Reads’ series.