Xandra Bingley ran away from her farm and horses aged seventeen. She went to London to MI5 to save England from communist invasion and then travelled to America with an English poet. In Ireland she started renovations on a lovely house in Co. Kildare. In England again she failed as a law student and joined Ian Hamilton's literary magazine The New Review, moving on to Jonathan Cape. She ran her own Literary Agency for fifteen years. A ride across the farm led to her first published book.