Fay Weldon, novelist, dies aged 91
The free-spirited novelist and dramatist, known for literary innovation and fantastical storylines, divided the critics.
Fay Weldon, CBE, FRSL, novelist, playwright and journalist
Born on September 22, 1931. Died on January 4, 2023, aged 91
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IT was the extravagant acts of revenge that she devised for her slighted heroines that set Fay Weldon apart from other novelists dealing with the ever-tempting theme of oppressed womankind. “It seemed to me when I wrote The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,” she said, “that women were so much in the habit of being good it would do nobody any harm if they learnt to be a little bad - that is to say, burn down their houses, give away their children, put their husband in prison, steal his money and turn themselves into their husband’s mistress.” And so, in her novel of 1983, that is exactly what she had her she-devil heroine do.
Unafraid of going wildly over the top with her storylines, she decided early on to concoct her plots as she went along, rather than work them out in advance: “Otherwise it’s not interesting for me as a writer,” she explained. The result, for the critic Lucy Hughes-Hallett, reviewing Weldon’s Mantrapped in The Sunday Times in 2004, was that “Fay Weldon . . . writes as if she is skateboarding - in a whirling rush and clatter, always, it seems, in imminent danger of coming adrift from the narrative that is her unstable vehicle, sustained only by her own speed . . . pitching over drops and slamming off walls as she hurtles back and forth between reminiscence and fantasy, doleful confession and ribald satire”.
“Read Fay Weldon’s autobiography,” said the critic Alex Clark, “and her fiction suddenly seems a whole lot less peculiar.” And certainly, as a young woman, Weldon lived a dramatic life, on which she was clearly reflecting when she said: “Fiction never seems a patch on real life . . . Write the truth and no one believes you: it’s too alarming. So you might as well make it up.”
As many topics that particularly appealed to her - from genetic modification and house husbands to cloning and Polish nannies - were also of fascination to the chattering classes, she was regularly in the literary headlines. Her eagerness to try anything new kept her there. She was thought, for example, to be the first British novelist to write a book, instalment by instalment, for the internet (Woodworm, in 2000); the first to become official writer in residence at the Savoy Hotel in London (in 2003); and the first to be paid for a product placement (when Bulgari controversially commissioned her to mention its jewellery in a book, published in 2001 as The Bulgari Connection). She just shrugged off criticism, saying: “Have I betrayed the sacred name of literature? Well, what the heck?”
Large numbers of her female readers were delighted to find an author who could solace them in the more traumatic of their relations with the opposite sex. Feeling that she was speaking directly to them, they were rallied by her unflagging energy and her humour, and by the vicarious thrill of reading about whatever outlandish strategies her oppressed heroines adopted to survive this battle of the sexes. But while some literary critics loved her, finding her wickedly witty, others loathed her, labelling her garrulous and even dull.
One of Weldon’s greatest charms, however, was that she responded graciously to criticism. “I think one changes, and possibly improves, by perceiving one’s own mistakes and by reading one’s own bad reviews, with which I too often agree,” she told an interviewer.
Critics’ diverse reactions to her 2007 novel, The Spa Decameron - an updated and feminised version of Boccaccio’s Decameron - were typical. While one (male) reviewer deplored Weldon’s “drab writing, ungainly organisation and silly truisms” and “leaden would-be aphorisms”, another critic - Sarah Vine in this newspaper - took the opportunity of applauding Weldon’s “clear understanding of the female condition”, adding: “What makes her such a compelling writer is her ability to translate it on to the page in a format that is not only effortlessly fluid, but also immensely entertaining.”
As a child, Fay Weldon had an unsettled home life. Her British-born parents, Frank Birkinshaw, a doctor, and his wife Margaret, emigrated to New Zealand in 1930, but a year later were already living apart in one of a long series of separations. For Weldon’s birth, Margaret was briefly in Britain, without Frank, returning to New Zealand with the baby shortly afterwards. But any reconciliation with her husband was short-lived and the young Weldon and her elder sister Jane were shuttled to and fro between their parents for years, both before and after the inevitable divorce. Both parents had admitted to infidelity.
Weldon soon developed into an avid reader, returning children’s books so rapidly to her local library in Christchurch, New Zealand, that the flabbergasted librarians were unable to believe she had read them and felt impelled to test her on their contents: she passed with flying colours. Particular favourites were Hans Christian Andersen fairy stories and Tolkien fantasies, so it is perhaps not surprising that, in later years, Weldon’s own novels were described by one reviewer as “modern fairytales . . . untroubled by humdrum plausibility”.
And so they were indeed, as her characters suffer sudden and miraculous gender swaps (Mantrapped, 2004), sinister scrutiny by witches (Puffball, 1980) and even asexual reproduction without their knowledge or consent (The Cloning of Joanna May, 1989).
Returning to the UK with her mother and sister in 1946, when she was 15, Weldon never saw her father again. After school in London and Sussex, she studied economics and psychology at St Andrews University and then worked on the Polish desk of the Foreign Office’s propaganda and intelligence-gathering arm. She resigned that position in 1954 when she became pregnant, but, boldly for those days, did not marry the baby’s father, Colyn Davies - a folk singer working as a bouncer - even though (or perhaps because) he offered to support her and the baby, Nicolas, by training to be a gas fitter, which would, it seems, have provided the three of them with a free house in Luton. Instead she changed her name to his by deed poll, and took a job at the Daily Mirror, answering readers’ queries about hire purchase, while her mother looked after the baby.
The mid-Fifties were not the easiest of times, socially or financially, for single mothers, and it was to give her son a home that Weldon eventually married, not the baby’s father, but a schoolmaster 25 years her senior, Ronald Bateman. She did it, she said, because she needed a roof over her head. “Poor Ronald Bateman,” she recalled with a fluffy laugh, pronouncing her rs as ws. “I was a heartless, practical monster.” Bizarrely, and acting for all the world like a character from one of Weldon’s future novels, her husband declined to consummate the marriage, encouraging her instead to work as a Soho nightclub hostess and report back to him on her affairs with other men. Equally bizarrely, she later discovered that he had also been quite mercenary, needing a wife and child simply to create the right impression for his job applications. “You couldn’t make it up,” as people were to say of this and other freakish incidents in Weldon’s life, revealed when she published her autobiographical work, Auto da Fay, in 2002.
In 1955, with commercial television about to be launched, Weldon applied for, and to her astonishment was given, a job in television advertising. She was unqualified, but then so were her colleagues. “None of us had the slightest idea what we were doing,” she wrote in her autobiography: this was, after all, a brand-new profession. Weldon was one of the team that made the very first British television commercial, for Gibbs SR toothpaste. She worked on other significant accounts, too, most famously as manager of the Ogilvy, Benson and Mather team that, in 1957, created the slogan “Go to work on an egg” for the British Egg Marketing Board’s commercials featuring Tony Hancock.
Her first marriage ended after two years in 1959. Four years later she married Ron Weldon, an artist, antiques dealer and jazz musician, while pregnant with her second child Dan. This marriage lasted 30 years. “Both Ron and I went to see our analysts twice a week so really there was no need to speak to each other,” she recalled drily. The marriage produced two more sons, Tom and Sam. When Tom was 27 he was sent to prison for three years for a drug offence. He now works in computer graphics.
In 1994, the same year her second husband died eight hours before their divorce was finalised, she married Nick Fox, her manager, but in 2020 this union also ended in divorce.
When her children were still small Weldon, still turning out television commercials - many of them (like the breakfast-egg series) virtually mini-sagas - took what seemed to be the short step from that to writing television drama. With ITV’s Play of the Week and the BBC’s Wednesday Play, just two of the strands that were then constantly on the lookout for new work, it was a time when television could not seem to get enough drama scripts. Despite her husband’s distinct lack of enthusiasm (he would not, for example, allow her to type at home), Weldon was only too happy to oblige.
Four of her television plays were produced in 1966, five in 1967, and thereafter they came in a steady stream that included her much-admired pilot of 1971 for ITV’s Upstairs, Downstairs, and her 1980 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, well received at the time but in 1995 eclipsed by Andrew Davies’s more robust dramatisation. Weldon wrote the pilot for Upstairs, Downstairs with some feeling. Her mother had once had a job as a live-in housekeeper and Weldon was “aware”, she said, “of the helplessness of Downstairs and the propensity of Upstairs to dehumanise Downstairs”. She redressed that balance by dint of the strong characters she created for, among others, Hudson the butler, Mrs Bridges the cook and Rose the upstairs parlourmaid.
After the pilot she wrote two more Upstairs, Downstairs episodes but was dropped from the series when her unorthodox method of dealing with requests for script changes came to light: she co-operated with a first request, but, if asked for further alterations, would simply revert to her initial script, in the expectation that its mere familiarity would ensure its adoption. It was a device that worked well until a journalist exposed it, having managed to get hold of some of the drafts.
After turning one of her early TV plays, The Fat Woman’s Tale (1966), into her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967), Weldon went on to write more than 25 other novels, adapting a number of them for television. The best known, because of its outrageous storyline, was her fantastical story of a spurned wife’s sensational revenge, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, published in novel form in 1983, and turned into a popular TV series three years later, and into a less satisfactory Hollywood movie, She-Devil, three years after that.
Also a writer of stage and radio plays, an outspoken and always topical journalist and an approachable, generous and highly effective mentor of new writers, Weldon kept frenziedly busy well into her seventies with public readings, controversial utterances at literary festivals and a new role, from 2006, as professor of creative writing at Brunel University. She had barely changed from her younger days: she still had the same icy-blue saucer eyes, the same moon face, the same high, pouchy cheekbones, the same bob of pale blonde hair. Her expression was still one of mischief masquerading as innocence.
In 1971 she won the best series-script prize from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain for her pilot episode of Upstairs, Downstairs. Other awards included a Los Angeles Times fiction prize in 1989 for The Heart of the Country, and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award 1996 for her collection of short stories, Wicked Women. There was also a Booker Prize nomination for her 1978 novel, Praxis. In 1988 and 1990 she received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bath and St Andrews, and in 2001 she was appointed CBE. By the end of her career she had published more than 50 books.
“Things are not made better if you face them,” she reflected airily in later life. “They are just reactivated. I’m all for denial. It’s a tried and tested survival mechanism.”
The Times
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