15-10-2000
FAY WELDON
(1931 - )
Another pages about this author, here, here and here
BIOGRAPHY
Fay Weldon was born in Worcester, England in 1931 (or 1933). Her original name is Franklin Birkinshaw.
Her father was a doctor and her mother was a writer of commercial fiction under the pen name "Pearl Bellairs." Her parents divorced when she was five, after which her family moved to New Zealand. She lived with her mother, sister and grandmother until she started college and, as a result, grew up believing "the world was peopled by females."
She returned to England with her mother and studied economics and psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Her actual christened name was "Franklin Birkinshaw" (something to do with her mother's interest in numerology) which she feels contributed to her being accepted at St Andrews and permitted to study economics: the school assumed she was a male student applicant. (Sounds very much like a Fay Weldon novel, doesn't it?)
In her early twenties she was briefly married to a man more than twenty years her senior. It is not clear whether she had her first son during this marriage or earlier.
Raising her son as a single mother, she looks back on her twenties as times fraught with "odd jobs and hard times." She worked on the problem page of the Daily Mirror and then as a copywriter for the Foreign Office. She then embarked on an extremely successful career as an advertising copywriter becoming famous for her slogan 'Go to work on an egg'.
"Advertising was the only thing I could do in order to earn a decent enough living. . . I did it for about eight years."
She married Roy Weldon in 1962 and had three more sons. She then went through a mid-life crisis: "I was thirty, inadequate and depressed and ignorant, and knew it." She went through psychoanalysis, which gave her the self-knowledge and courage to give up advertising and start writing. Her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, was published in 1967, but by then she had already written some fifty plays for radio, stage, or television, the most well-known being Upstairs, Downstairs and her adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
For the next 30 years she built a wonderfully 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. She and Ron divided their time between bucolic splendour in Somerset and a flat in London. Eventually they did divorce in 1994.
Fay subsequently married Nick Fox, a poet, and her writing and career continue to flourish. They live in Hamptead, London.
Bibliography
Angel,
all innocence, and other stories
I
love my love : a play
Action
replay : a play
Words
of advice
Polaris
and other stories
The
Shrapnel Academy
Puffball
The
president's child
Praxis
Little
sisters
Remember
me
Rebecca
West
The
heart of the country
Growing
rich
Wicked
women : a collection of short stories
Moon
over Minneapolis, or, Why she couldn't stay
The
cloning of Joanna May
Remember
Me 1976
Words
of Advice
Praxis
: A Novel
Puffball
Watching
Me, Watching You
The
President's Child
Presidents
Child [LARGE PRINT]
Puffball
Vida
Y Amores De Una Maligna/the Life and Loves of a She-Devil
Words
of Advice
Rebecca
West (Lives of Modern Women)
The
Shrapnel Academy
Little
Sisters (Portway Large Print) [LARGE PRINT]
The
Shrapnel Academy
Heart
of the Country [LARGE PRINT]
The
Rules of Life (Harper Short Novel Series)
The
Heart of the Country
The
Shrapnel Academy (Magna General Series) [LARGE PRINT]
Polaris
and Other Stories (King Penguin)
The
Heart of the Country Paperback (February
1990)
Letters
to Alice; On First Reading Jane Austen Paperback
(August 1990)
The
Wife's Revenge and Other Stories [LARGE PRINT]
Sacred
Cows (Counterblasts Series)
Leader
of the Band (King Penguin)
Praxis
The
Cloning of Joanna May
Down
Among the Women Paperback (July
1991)
Moon
Over Minneapolis Paperback (1992)
The
Hearts and Lives of Men Paperback
(1992)
The
President's Child
Life
Force Paperback (1993) az Darcy's
Utopia Paperback (1993)
Life
Force Paperback (February 1993)
Female
Friends Paperback (May 1993)
The
Life and Loves of a She-Devil
Trouble
The
Life and Loves of a She-Devil Mass
Market Paperback (October 1993)
Bram
Stoker's Dracula Omnibus : Dracula/the Lair of the White Worm/Dracula's
Guest
Hardcover
1994
Trouble;
A Novel Paperback (October 1994)
Affliction
Paperback (1995)
The
Fat Woman's Joke Paperback (May
1995)
Splitting
Hardcover (June 1995)
Splitting
Paperback (June 1996)
Worst
Fears Paperback (June 1997)
Wicked
Women : Stories Hardcover (June
1997)
Nobody
Likes Me! Chaudio Munoz(Illustrator).
Big
Women Paperback (1998)
Big
Girls Don't Cry Hardcover (September 1998)
A
Hard Time to Be a Father Hardcover
(January 1999)
Wicked
Women Paperback (February 1999)
Big
Girls Don't Cry Paperback (October 1999)
Letters
to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen Paperback
(December 1999)
Moon
Over Minneapolis Paperback (December
1999)
A
Hard Time to Be a Father Paperback
(January 2000)
Rhode
Island Blues Hardcover (November 30, 2000)
QUOTES
Young
women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only
when you have children that you realize you're not a nice person at all, but
generally a selfish bully.
Worry
less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think
about them.
The
desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of
themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.
The
New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself . .
. .They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted
to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.
You
end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends,
the health, and the children you have earned.
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