Fay Weldon

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Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon CBE (born 22 September 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.

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[edit] Biography

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, alter-ego of the eponymous character in Aldous Huxley's short story, "Farcical History of Richard Greenow"). 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. While in England, she attended South Hampstead High School.

She went to St Andrews, Scotland to study psychology and economics but moved to London after giving birth to a 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.

In 2000, Fay Weldon became a member of the Church of England and was confirmed in St Paul's Cathedral, which was perhaps appropriate because she states that she likes to think that she was "converted by St Paul". [2]

In 2006 Fay Weldon was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, West London: “A great writer needs a certain personality and a natural talent for language, but there is a great deal that can be taught - how to put words together quickly and efficiently to make a point, how to be graceful and eloquent, how to convey emotion, how to build up tension, and how to create alternative worlds.”

[edit] Novels

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

[edit] References

  1. ^ Fay Weldon who has found God after 70 years as atheist talks to Stuart Jeffries | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
  2. ^ Why I am still an Anglican, Continuum 2006, page 134

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fay Weldon
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