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Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon CBE (born September 22, 1931) is a British novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrays contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of Western, in particular British, society.

Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw in Alvechurch, Worcestershire, England to a literary family, with both her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863-1938), and her own mother Margaret writing novels (the latter under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs, after a character from Huxley's 1922 novel Crome Yellow). Weldon spent the first years of her life in Auckland, New Zealand, where her father worked as a doctor, but at the age of 14, after her parents' divorce, moved to England with her mother and her sister Jane, never to see her father again.

She went to St Andrews, Scotland to study psychology and economics but moved to London after giving birth to an illegitimate child. Soon afterwards she married her first husband, Ronald Bateman, a teacher 20 years her senior and not the natural father of her son, and started to live in Acton, London. The couple got a divorce after only two years. To support herself and her son, who was now going to school, Weldon started working in the advertising industry. As Head of Copywriting at one point she was responsible for publicising the phrase "Go to work on an egg". She once coined the slogan "Vodka gets you drunker quicker". She said in a Guardian interview^[1] "It just seemed ... to be obvious that people who wanted to get drunk fast, needed to know this." Her bosses disagreed and suppressed it.

At 29 she met Ronald Weldon, an antiques dealer. They married and, starting in 1963, produced three more sons. It was during her second pregnancy that Weldon began writing for radio and television. A few years later, in 1967, she published her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke. For the next 30 years she built a very successful career, publishing over 20 novels, collections of short stories, television movies, newspaper and magazine articles and becoming a well-known face and voice on the BBC. In 1971 Fay Weldon wrote the first episode of the landmark television series Upstairs, Downstairs, for which she won a Writers Guild award for Best British TV Series Script. She also wrote the screenplay for the 1980 BBC miniseries adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice starring Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul. In 1989, she contributed to the book for the Petula Clark West End musical Someone Like You.

In 1994, Ronald and Fay Weldon divorced. She subsequently married Nick Fox, a poet, with whom she currently lives in Hampstead, London.

• The Fat Woman's Joke (1967)
• Down Among the Women (1971)
• Female Friends (1975)
• Remember Me (1976)
• Little Sisters (1977)
• Praxis (1978)
• Puffball (1980)
• The President's Child (1982)
• The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983)
• Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen(1984)
• The Shrapnel Academy (1986)
• The Heart of the Country (1987)
• The Hearts and Lives of Men (1987)
• Leader of the Band (1988)
• The Cloning of Joanna May (1989)
• Darcy's Utopia (1990)
• Affliction (1994)
• Growing Rich (1992)
• Life Force (1992)
• Splitting (1995)
• Worst Fears (1996)
• Big Women (1997)
• Rhode Island Blues (2000)
• The Bulgari Connection (2001)
• Mantrapped (2004)
• She May Not Leave (2006)

Weldon published an autobiography of her early years, Auto de Fay, in 2002 (an allusion to auto de fe).

• http://www.redmood.com/weldon/ created by Jan Hanford
• 1988 audio interview with Fay Weldon by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
• Guardian interview and review of What makes women happy (2006) - She describes her near death experience and spiritual journey from atheism to faith in God.