A Farewell to Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon, who died in January of this year, was an acerbic, and sometimes abrasive, voice for several generations of women readers. Her fiction, plays and screenplays consistently punctured myths of femininity, whether those be derived from conventional ideas of womanhood, or from feminist politics. A staunch and self-declared feminist, in both her fiction and in her public statements she consistently challenged ideals of femininity and long-held feminist orthodoxies. Her first novel, published in 1967, The Fat Woman’s Joke, emerged from a television play in which a woman gives into her desires for chocolate, cheese and science fiction, with absolutely no contrition and with no regard to her family. Down among the Women (1971), Little Sisters and Female Friends (both 1975) were woman-centred narratives and focused on women’s friendships, but these novels also suggested that not all women were sisters, and that gender was no guarantee of solidarity. Weldon’s 1980 novel, Puffball, demolishes fantasies of the Earth Mother and the dream of a rural idyll, as the protagonist, Liffey, with her vaguely ecological sensibility and her romantic idealizations of childbirth and of motherhood, comes up sharply against the mysterious realities of nature and of pregnancy. In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), Ruth becomes the eponymous she-devil by inverting the housewifely mantras of the Domestic Goddess and, in so doing, deliberately blows up her house, leaving her children abandoned. She goes on to enact a complex and fearsome vengeance on her philandering husband and his romance novelist inamorata (the novel was written at the height of the 1980s ‘power woman’, and Ruth becomes a vicious embodiment of the Thatcherite entrepreneur). The Life and Loves of a She-Devil was the novel that brought Weldon to a wider audience with a television adaptation in