Fay Weldon, who died in January of this year, was an acerbic, and sometimes abrasive, voice for several generations of women readers. Her fiction, plays and screenplays consistently punctured myths of femininity, whether those be derived from conventional ideas of womanhood, or from feminist politics. A staunch and self-declared feminist, in both her fiction and in her public statements she consistently challenged ideals of femininity and long-held feminist orthodoxies.
Her first novel, published in 1967, The Fat Woman’s Joke, emerged from a television play in which a woman gives into her desires for chocolate, cheese and science fiction, with absolutely no contrition and with no regard to her family. Down among the Women (1971), Little Sisters and Female Friends (both 1975) were woman-centred narratives and focused on women’s friendships, but these novels also suggested that not all women were sisters, and that gender was no guarantee of solidarity.
Weldon’s 1980 novel, Puffball, demolishes fantasies of the Earth Mother and the dream of a rural idyll, as the protagonist, Liffey, with her vaguely ecological sensibility and her romantic idealizations of childbirth and of motherhood, comes up sharply against the mysterious realities of nature and of pregnancy. In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Ruth becomes the eponymous she-devil by inverting the housewifely mantras of the Domestic Goddess and, in so doing, deliberately blows up her house, leaving her children abandoned. She goes on to enact a complex and fearsome vengeance on her philandering husband and his romance novelist inamorata (the novel was written at the height of the 1980s ‘power woman’, and Ruth becomes a vicious embodiment of the Thatcherite entrepreneur). The Life and Loves of a She-Devil was the novel that brought Weldon to a wider audience with a television adaptation in 1986 and a film, She-Devil, in 1989, although neither production quite managed to achieve the carnivalesque vindictiveness of the original text.
Weldon was born in London to a family of writers (her father was a doctor) and raised in New Zealand until the age of fifteen, when she returned to London with her mother and sister. As she recounts in her 2002 autobiography Auto Da Fay, this background gave her a nuanced relationship with English culture and society, which she viewed with a caustic eye. She was ever alert to social and technological change, addressing the impacts on individuals and communities of scientific developments (The Cloning of Joanna May, 1989), and of gentrification (Chalcot Crescent, 2009).
Weldon had her feet in the camps of both literary and commercial success; she was a writer who defied the boundaries between the cultural establishment and popular culture. The Hearts and Minds of Men was first published as a weekly serial in the magazine Woman (in the tradition of Dickens, as she noted in her autobiography), although the novel, published in 1987, made no mention of this iteration. Her television scripts ranged from literary adaptation, Pride and Prejudice (1980) to the first episode of Upstairs, Downstairs (1971); her contributions to theatre included the book for a musical vehicle for Petula Clark. Made a CBE in 2001, she was nominated for the Booker Prize, the Whitbread, and was the Chair of the judging panel for the Booker in 2020. To the consternation of many, she published a novel with product placement in The Bulgari Connection (2000); her fee required her include the jewellers’ name at least twelve times but she cheerfully referred to their products thirty-six times.
Weldon’s personal life was as unpredictable as her fiction; she was married three times, divorcing her final husband at the age of 91. She was a generous figure for other women writers, regularly endorsing new novelists with cover quotes, and was often to be found speaking at conferences, literary festivals and student events. Although never convinced that writing well was a skill that could be taught, she held two academic posts, at Brunel University from 2006 and later at Bath Spa from 2012. In person, Weldon was smilingly polite with a mellifluous voice and charming demeanour that camouflaged the wickedness of her wit. That voice is also to be found in her narrations, which lure the reader with a deceptive intimacy before shocking them into a reassessment of their assumptions about gender relations and about fiction.
It is hard to recognize that there will never be a new Fay Weldon novel again, but she has left us a legacy of over thirty novels, a string of scripts for theatre and television, essays, short stories and children’s books. Never sentimental, her work was challenging but also reliably bracing (especially if the reader were suffering heartbreak at the hands of a man). Hers was a distinctive voice that could ruffle feathers, but was never boring. In the 1997 novel Big Women Weldon pilloried a particular kind of feminism, her fictional feminist publishing company ‘Medusa’ has disconcerting echoes of the magazine Spare Rib, of Virago Press and also of the early days of Women: a cultural review. She knew us all too well.