Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon CBE, FRSL (born Franklin Birkinshaw; 22 September 1931 – 4 January 2023) was an English author, essayist and playwright.

Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including ''Puffball'' (1980), '' The Cloning of Joanna May'' (1989), '' Wicked Women'' (1995)'' and The Bulgari Connection'' (2000), but was most well-known as the writer of ''The Life and Loves of a She-Devil'' (1983) which was televised by the BBC in 1986.

Married three times and with four children, Weldon was a self-declared feminist. Her work features what she described as "overweight, plain women". She said there were many reasons why she became a feminist, including the "appalling" lack of equal opportunities and the myth that women were supported by male relatives.

Early life

Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw to a literary family in Birmingham, England, on 22 September 1931. Her maternal grandfather, Edgar Jepson (1863–1938), her uncle Selwyn Jepson and her mother Margaret Jepson wrote novels (the latter sometimes under the nom de plume Pearl Bellairs, from the name of a character in Aldous Huxley's short story "Farcical History of Richard Greenow").

Weldon grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand, where her father, Frank Thornton Birkinshaw, worked as a doctor. In 1936, when she was five, her parents agreed to separate, later divorcing (1940). She and her sister Jane spent the summers with her father, first in Coromandel, later in Auckland. She attended Christchurch Girls' High School for two years from 1944. Weldon has described herself as a "plump, cheerful child", stating in a blog post that began as an unpublished article for the ''Daily Mail'': "I was born large, blonde and big-boned into a family of small beautiful women. My mother thought it was unlikely that anyone would marry me, and therefore I would have to pass exams, earn my own living and make my own way in the world. Or that’s what I thought she thought." She goes on to explain how this view of herself affected her later writing career. "I’d be happier to have been seen as a skinny, feisty child, a slim and serious adult, and a handsome octogenarian with an interesting literary past. But that was not to be, despite a lifetime of diets. It was however a state of affairs which made me write a good few novels with overweight, plain women as their heroines. I’ve always been on their side – they are the unseen majority."

In September 1946, when she was 15, Weldon returned to England with her mother and sister. She recalled: "I was a literary groupie from the antipodes...Not that I had any intention of being a writer at the time – too much like hard work. All I wanted was to get married and have babies." She did not see her father again before his death in 1949.

In England Weldon won a scholarship to the all-girls South Hampstead High School, before going on to study Psychology and Economics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Later she recalled attending classes with the moral philosopher Malcolm Knox, who "spoke exclusively to the male students, maintaining that women were incapable of moral judgement or objectivity." She completed her Master of Arts in 1952 and moved to London, where she worked as a clerk at the Foreign Office for a salary of £6 a week.

Early career

Weldon had temporary jobs as a waitress and hospital ward orderly before working as a clerk for the Foreign Office, where she wrote pamphlets to be dropped in Eastern Europe as part of the Cold War. She had to leave this job after she became pregnant. Later she took a job with Crawford's Advertising Agency, where she worked with the writer Elizabeth Smart, and where she could earn enough to support herself and her young son (Nicolas).

As head of copywriting at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, she was responsible for publicising (but not originating) the phrase " Go to work on an egg". She coined the slogan "Vodka gets you drunker quicker," saying in a ''Guardian'' interview: "It just seemed ... to be obvious that people who wanted to get drunk fast needed to know this." Her bosses disagreed and suppressed it.

Literary career

Writing career

In 1963 Weldon began writing for radio and television. In 1967, her first novel, ''The Fat Woman's Joke'' was published. "When I submitted my first novel in 1966 it was accepted without demur. I thought this was because I was a wonderful writer, But it wasn't. It was because I had learned to have nothing turned down." She subsequently built a successful and prolific career, publishing over thirty novels, collections of short stories, films for television, newspaper and magazine articles and becoming a well-known face and voice on the BBC
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