British writer most widely known in the UK and abroad as an irreverent novelist largely concerned with women’s issues as well as active in a wide variety of projects for television, radio, and the stage. Weldon was one of the few authors whose every new novel or story was endlessly discussed and argued over.
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.
Born in England, Weldon grew up in New Zealand where she attended the University of St. Andrew’s, earning an MA in economics and psychology in 1954. Raised in a literary family, she grew up reading nonstop. Her writing career began with the Foreign Office and Daily Mirror in London in the late ‘50s and after a decade of odd jobs and hard times she began writing fiction. Her first novel was published in 1967 as an extension of her advertising career in which she continued for an additional three years while producing teleplays.
During the early ‘70s, Weldon’s name and public voice gained stature, seen as satirical and often barbed. She not only won a prestigious Booker Prize nomination for Praxis (1978), but chaired the prize’s 1983 panel. She never divorced her “serious” literary work from her own enjoyment of what she called “that whole women’s magazine area, the communality of women’s interests, and the sharing of the latest eye-shadow.” It is therefore not surprising to read her polemical prison docudrama Life for Christine (1980), as well as her script for Joan Collins’ miniseries Sin (1985), in contrast to her critical eye focused on pastoral life in Heart of the Country (1987). Weldon has been notably represented on British TV and abroad through two popular multi-part adaptations from her novels, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), televised in 1986, which sharply satirized conventions of both heterosexual romance and the romance novel, and The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), televised in 1992, a slightly more genteel version of the antics in She-Devil, this time as practised by a devilish husband.
She married Ron Weldon in 1962 and was widowed two years later. She had a brief second marriage to give her illegitimate first son a name and in 1965 she married Nick Fox; they had three more sons. She lost her one-year-older sister to a brain tumour.
Fay Weldon died at a care home in Northampton, England on 4 January 2023 at the age of 91.
Link to Wikipedia biography