Born 22 September 22nd, 1931
Died January 4th, 2023
The novelist Fay Weldon, who has died aged 91, was to an unusual extent the creation of her own extravagant imagination. A polemicist whose opinions shaped themselves around the plot of her latest book, a pragmatist who giggled her way through every sentence, she was mischievous and evasive, yet wilfully and wittily life-affirming.
“I long for a day of judgment when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear,” she wrote in her rackety 2002 autobiography, Auto da Fay. “We take to fiction, I suppose, because no such thing is going to happen, and at least on the printed page we can observe beginnings, middles and ends and can find where morality resides.”
With these lines, Weldon gave a big wink to her future obituarists: catch me if you can, she appears to be saying – there is nothing you can write about me that I have not written about myself, and it is the storyteller who is in command of the meaning of events, insofar as there is one.
It is perhaps not going too far to say that, like Ruth, the “heroine” of one of her best-known novels, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Weldon moulded herself into a succession of identities designed to sandbag her against the misfortune of having been raised – literally and metaphorically – in an earthquake zone.
In literal terms, that zone was New Zealand, where her childhood, as the younger of two sisters born during the short marriage of her English mother, Margaret (née Jepson), and emigrant father, Frank Birkinshaw, a doctor, was periodically rocked by earth tremors. The first struck while Fay was still in the womb, forcing her young mother to flee the city of Napier and take refuge on a sheep farm, where she remained for three months without knowing whether her philandering husband was alive or dead. “Dr Birkinshaw, my father,” wrote Weldon, with that familiar tang of salt in her phrasing, “was too busy with the injured to take care of his young wife.”
Traumatised by the earthquake and by her husband’s abandonment, Margaret returned to the UK, to Frank’s family in Barnt Green, Worcestershire, and gave birth to her second daughter, whom she named Franklin because she had been expecting a boy, but who was soon known as Fay. “Thus I started out in a state of ambivalence,” wrote Weldon. “I took out library books as Franklin and read them as Fay.”
After one last try to make a go of the marriage in New Zealand, Margaret left for lodgings in a hotel in Christchurch, and began to earn her own living, writing romantic novels under the pen name Pearl Bellairs, borrowed from Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow. She sent her daughters off to a nearby convent school, where Fay had pashes on girls and became fascinated by the mutilation of saints. “They were beautiful and good, and pain was their reward. I was fascinated and horrified: I knew there was something wrong in my response but not quite what.”
In 1946, Fay, her mother and her sister, Jane, returned to Europe and settled in London, and she won a scholarship to South Hampstead High School for girls. They lived in the basement of a house where her mother worked as a live-in housekeeper. She went on to study psychology at University of St Andrews – which she blamed for her argumentative streak – and, after stints as a waitress and a hospital orderly, landed a job on the Polish desk of the Foreign Office propaganda unit, the Information Research Department. There she began her writing career, penning pamphlets that were designed to be air-dropped on Poland as part of the cold war effort.
The Foreign Office was too buttoned-up to accommodate her for long, and she left after becoming pregnant by a singer and nightclub doorman, and deciding that she wanted the baby, but not the father. When a stint running a tea shop (which she claimed was haunted) in Saffron Walden, Essex, with her mother and sister became too much, she launched a letter-writing campaign to potential London employees and landed a job as an agony aunt at the Daily Mirror.
But readers’ problems were not as exciting as the opportunities offered by the new commercial television, and before long she was embarking on the heady life of an advertising copywriter. It was a career that was to produce one of the most famous slogans of the 1950s, “Go to work on an egg” (Weldon has said she did not actually write it, but was running the campaign that produced it).
Employment was never going to be straightforward for such a wayward spirit, and when she had had enough of the demands of reconciling single motherhood with making a living, in 1956 she married a schoolmaster 25 years her senior. Ronald Bateman didn’t want sex himself but was happy for her to see other men, in a two-year union so mind-bogglingly disreputable that, in her autobiography, she resorts to referring to herself in the third person. She only returns to herself after meeting the jazz musician and antiques dealer Ron Weldon, who in 1962 was to become her second husband.
Fay Weldon wrote her first television play while impatiently awaiting the arrival of the first of their three sons. A Catching Complaint was screened in 1966 as an ITV play of the week, with a cast including Derek Godfrey, Hylda Baker and Tessa Wyatt. The following year, she published her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967).
From then on she wrote at an industrial rate, turning out more than 30 novels at the same time as continuing a screenwriting career that included the pilot of the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs.
Puffball – her novel of pregnancy as a fungal condition – was published and serialised in Company magazine in 1980. The year after she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Praxis (1978), one of a succession of tales of women transforming themselves to take control of their own destinies in a discriminatory world. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil was televised with Patricia Hodge, Julie T Wallace and Dennis Waterman in 1986, and made into a film starring Roseanne Barr in 1989.
This was the peak of second-wave feminism, and Weldon’s populist and rather witchy novels were making her one of its high priestesses, while her ability to write topically and at speed suited the burgeoning market in women’s magazines. Her 1987 novel The Hearts and Lives of Men was first published in weekly instalments in Woman’s Own.
She was also becoming part of the literary establishment, albeit a grandee who judged prizes more often than she won them.
Always ready to turn out newspaper opinion pieces for a suitable fee, she could be relied on to say the unsayable, defending facelifts, rounding on feminists, on rape victims, on men and – after Ron left her for his psychotherapist after 30 years of marriage – on the confessional industry. “The more we understand each other, the harder it seems to us to cleave to one another for any length of time,” she wrote.
Ron died in 1994 as their divorce became final. Fay remarried within a year and continued writing and making headlines from the home in Dorset that she shared with her third husband, Nick Fox, a poet and one-time bookseller, who became her manager. He was a quiet presence in the background of many a media profile, serving up plates of pasta, and stepping in to temper her wilder assertions, while Weldon gleefully decried the domestic incompetence of husbands. They separated in 2020.
It would be wrong to dismiss Weldon as a publicity-seeking controversialist. Though she could be infuriatingly contradictory, she saw the pain of the human condition out of the corner of mischievous eyes. A member of the Royal Society of Literature, who was made a CBE in 2001, she was generous to other writers. In her knack at identifying and hitching herself to the zeitgeist and her skill at keeping herself in the public eye, she created a template for a writer’s life that seems prophetic. Hers was a prototype “dandelion career” – releasing clouds of creativity and seeing where each spore landed – long before the term was invented by writers two generations younger than her.
Her son Tom died in 2019. She is survived by her sons, Nick, Dan and Sam, and her stepdaughter, Karen.